Young children care what others think of them, but are these concerns specific to interactions with humans? Here we ask whether 4-year-old children engage in self-presentational behaviors even with a puppet. After failing to activate a toy in the presence of a puppet, children selectively demonstrated their success on the toy when the puppet was absent during their final success. This pattern was found when the puppet was treated as an agent capable of holding mental states (Exp.1), but not when it was treated as an object (Exp.2); we further explore the role of indirect, linguistic cues to the puppet’s agency (Exp.3). These results highlight the importance of social contexts, particularly how an entity is depicted by others, in eliciting self-presentational behaviors. We discuss how depiction of puppets may influence their effectiveness in developmental research, and the possibility of self-presentational concerns in children’s interactions with social robots and AI agents. •Self-presentational behaviors may not be limited to interactions with humans.•Children are willing to show off their abilities even to a puppet.•Describing the puppet as an agent or an object modulates this tendency.