Pretend Play from BTDT parents

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Hi All,

Our son is now almost 2.5 years old (diagnosed as HFA, or whatever that means this early anyway, at 21 months). Currently quite verbal at or above age expected level. What we struggle the most with is pretend play. He just gets super overstimulated by following "complex" play schemes/sequences such as wash the food, cook the food, serve in plates and eat. He does one step little sequences by himself sometimes but they are very fragmented and stand in isolation.
When overstimulated he reverts to his "favorite" repetitive activity - piling things inappropriately.

So my questions are:

1. Did you see this with your kids and was there an age where things started clicking in the "pretend" department and sequencing pretend situations started getting easier and done more independently.

2. Any advice on encouraging/developing pretend play skills?

My son is 8. He never does/did really pretend play. Occasionally he'll have a brief Lego man battle, but it only last a couple of minutes. He enjoys building things from Lego, K'nex, and Erector sets. He enjoys strategy games like Minecraft. When he was younger he liked to sort his toys by color, size, etc. When he was your son's age he liked to pull all the books off the bookshelf and dump out his toybox and never really play with any of the toys. I just followed him around all day picking up messes and being really stressed out.
What I'm trying to say is, I think it's great that you're trying to encourage pretend play, but it's possible that that particular type of play is just something in which your son is not going to engage.

Check out Floortime videos on youtube, and books by Stanley Greenspan. The Floortime/DIR therapy approach is all about encouraging and developing play skills, and extending interactive engagement.

My son wasn't diagnosed until age 5. He was never into lining things up, just seemed more interested in very physical activities like climbing and jumping, and not particularly interested in toys or pretend play. With him, it seems like he eventually ends up developing appropriate play skills -- it's more of a delay than a deficit. For instance, at age 5 he started re-enacting the plot of TV shows he had watched, but by age 7 he was making up his own stories. At 5 he wouldn't let the other person change the narrative of the story, but now he does. At 5 he would just ignore the other kid when I set up a playdate, now at 8 he is starting to skateboard with other kids in the neighborhood. So some kids do develop play skills without intervention, but if I had a 2.5 yo I would want to do what I could to help things along.

Pretend play was always a conundrum for me. The lack of "spontaneous" pretend play is an indicator for autism. One of the nurses at our first pediatrician's office was very into the notion that we needed to work on this. This was prior to diagnosis and I guess the notion was to avoid getting one. My son was not interested in it and he basically laughed at me when I modeled it b/c what I was doing was nonsensical. I thought he was smart. If you look at it from a certain perspective it is absolutely ridiculous to talk into a pretend phone etc. Sometimes, he would do it to humor me, but this was not spontaneous, and not something that made sense to him. I would occasionally try to work on it, because I felt I needed to, but it did not make sense.

Then one day, when he was close to 3, we were reading a book in it that had a story and picture of a cat. He just spontaneously got on all fours. That was the beginning. It was spontaneous, and it happened because a light came on in his head. He would just go on all fours--no meowing or anything, here and there. i would model meowing, and pretend to be his mommy cat, but he did it how he liked. He then, eventaully, would pounce and that kind of thing, but he wanted to be a quiet kitty and did not want to meow.

When he hit about 4, he was pretend playing a lot more, and for the past 3 years or so, he has been doing it a lot (even when he is not supposed to.) That said, it is heavily scripted, and not typical reciprocal NT type play. That is how it is. I encourage him to accept my input and suggestions, and it is a thing we work on. Not so much for the pretend aspect, but for reciprocity.

Would working on it more thoroughly, earlier, have helped his Theory of Mind, or any of that? I have no idea. Maybe it is one of those things where lack of ToM correlates with lack of spontaneous pretend play and forcing the issue does nothing until the mind is receptive to it. I don't know. I do feel that I spent unnecessary time worrying about it, and I don't think, in our case, the outcome would have been any different had I labored tirelessly at it.

So anyway. TL:DR --The fact that your son is doing it at all is a good thing. The sequencing and continuity abilities build over time. The best way to work on it is just try to extend what he is doing a little bit. I don't think you need to be pushy (although, maybe someone else has insight as to why I might be wrong) Just challenge him to go a little farther and try not to be upset if he chooses to continue to play as he does. I think the main thing, is giving him ideas of where to take it when the desire is there and trying to build in a foundation for accepting reciprocity.

Great suggestions - thank you for replying everyone.

If ToM is related to pretend play and vice versa (which I don't doubt it is bc it does make sense that it would be)...then again, my kid incredibly confusing to me. He has exceptionally strong ToM for his age, which is by itself kind of crazy, right? Anyway, when motivated to manipulate to get his ultimate goals met, he is like 5 steps ahead of me/his dad/anyone, which he needs to have ToM to do, right? - as in he needs to know what I would say in order to plan his steps ahead of me to "trick" me into saying "yes." It's getting complicated. Sorry. Anyway, bottom line is his therapists and I both agree he has unusually strong ToM, not just for a kid on the spectrum but also for an NT kid his age.

Or maybe pretend play is a combination of ToM and reciprocity??

Because we definitely have some strong deficits in the reciprocity department. It still sounds funny to talk about reciprocity with a 2-year old but you know what I mean...

Floortime has this great concept called "playful obstructions" , which I've often used with kids. One example of that is a kid playing with trains, and then the adult interrupts the repetitive activity by dropping their arm over the train track, and saying "oh no! a tree fell on the track!" now the game changes to trying to clean up the tracks. The goal is to challenge the child to problem solve and get outside of their comfort zone without getting frustrated. Another example is playing dumb; I worked with a mother who took off her shoes. The child told her to put her shoes on, so she put them on her hands. He said "no! not on your hands!" So then she put them on her head, and he said "No, put your shoes on your feet"...You always have to strike a balance in these sorts of games, because you don't want to frustrate the child. You have to be able to read their mood, and know their skill level, and try something that is just challenging enough for them to figure out, without frustrating them. Once the child gets frustrated, the learning is over for that session. You can also prompt the child through things in order to reduce difficulty, but ideally the child will learn to creatively problem solve out of these difficult situations.

If you don't like the jargon of floor time, "Incidental Teaching" and "Pivotal Response Training" include very similar techniques, but with a behavioral jargon attached to them (the way that they describe things makes a lot more sense to me, but there are several similarities).

I am curious if you've used other types of pretend play. I can't say that my son at that age would have connected to wash the dishes, eat the food and so on; we didn't even try. Of course, we also did not know he was ASD and weren't out to teach him anything at all other than the normal boy basics, and were quite happy to run with his natural interests. Which were things like marching bands (he LOVED to pretend play marching band), vacuum cleaners (who knows why), and of course Legos and Trains. And he was always much, much more interested in inventing his own narratives than following someone else's. I'd say to this day he still has little patience for someone else's narrative, and I honestly don't think it is so much that he can't follow it, but that he doesn't see any point to following it, although the ToM straddle could definitely play a part (most people don't enjoy things that are harder for them than for others). It is interesting because he truly enjoys following a script and acting on stage, but in that situation maybe the difference is that he has time to study the mind he is getting into, and does not have to do it spontaneously.

Anyway, my point is if I am wondering if you are trying to draw him into pretend play that he has some natural interest in, or if you are trying to engage him on topics he is theoretically supposed to be able to engage in. The former is always much more successful for ASD kids than the later.

Dont' make your son pretend play if he doesn't like it. I never pretend played my whole life. I was more into stacking blocks into giant structures.

PS - what do you mean by "BTDT parent?"

BTDT -- been there done that

Also, I wonder if the sequencing thing is an early sign of executive function difficulties like those in ADHD. I remember always being stuck on the "can he dress himself" question, because at age 5 DS had the motor skills to dress himself, but could not focus long enough to put underwear, pants, and shirt on. He also had big issues with keeping a sequence in his head when I started teaching him to wash himself in the shower at age 6. But he could put together a sequence on a story board without any problem.