24 month old doesn't like "people" figures in cars

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Hello All,

I am the mom of a 24 month old boy who has in the last 2 months been diagnosed with PDD-NOS or ASD. He seems to be cognitively ahead of his peers and receptive language is great. He is quickly gaining speech as he undergoes intense ST, whereas 2 months ago (before he was diagnosed), he had no words at all.

Anyway, our main concern right now and something that baffles us is his dislike for people figures/toys being in his play schemes - if we put a little person toy in one of his cars, for example, he will take him/her and throw him/her out, same goes for toy houses, etc. ABA worked on this and he had started to tolerate it and even enjoy playing with them appropriately and now he is reverting back to not liking them - will anger if we keep putting them back in his cars.

Has anybody else experienced this with their LO? How do you redirect or get him/her to accept this type of play. Any and all ideas and suggestions are appreciated.

p.s. LO is very very social with real people, great eye contact, good joint attention, initiates interaction, seeks out company (mostly adults and older kids), etc...so much so that people tend to go back and forth on his diagnosis...but we, the parents, are quite sure he is on the spectrum because of the "full picture."

Appreciate your help!

Last edited by PigsTail on 09 Oct 2013, 7:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not really sure why this is a concern. Does he say at all why he doesn't like the figures?

I don't get it, either. OP, is this your ABA's idea for a goal or yours? My son used to hate Thomas b/c it was a train with a face. I think it freaked him out. I just put the train away until he wasn't alarmed by it.

Encouraging/forcing traditional children's play won't make you son any less autistic. It might facilitate better social interactions, but this particular goal does not make sense to me. Playing with the vehicles without the figurines seems just as good to me, if that is what your child wants to do. Even NT kids do not integrate people proxies into everything they do. Sometimes they just want to go "vroom, vroom", too.

Note: I don't buy into encouraging NT activities solely b/c NTs do them. Not everything NTs do is intrinsically valuable. If I am going to devote time and energy to shaping a behavior, there has to be a concrete reason for it. Otherwise to me, play is supposed to be fun, even if it is a quirky kind of fun. We work on things, don't get me wrong, but they are carefully targeted.

Our son was the same way! For him, it was rigidity. When we first had concerns about ASD and they asked us if he lined up toys/spun toys - our initial answer was "No". It seemed like he was playing correctly (driving cars/trains around). However, when one of his therapists tried to put a teddy bear into the train, he just cried and cried. That was when we realized that although, on first glace, his play seemed normal - it was really repetitive. It took us 2 months in therapy to get the teddy bear into the train. Each week, we just inched it closer and closer. I felt like we conquered Mt Everest when the teddy bear got his first ride to the house After that, he was fine with figures. In fact, for years that was all he would play with - little figures acting out stories. So, maybe try reintroducing them slowly?

It is both a concern of ours as well as of his BCBA. Not sure why the BCBA has taken an issue with it but for us, the parents, it just seem anti-social, kind of, sort of and this scares us - I guess we are very new to this and quite confused.

Why would he such a problem with little toy people...and it is consistent across all setting. Pilots in airplanes, lego people in lego settings, etc, etc.

A boys play may be far more complex then you realise, a complete and perfect imaginary world constructed around a few toys, with the figures, you might be trying to introduce something that doesn't fit in with the particular fantasy and therefore would evaporate the make believe.

As an example, he might be engrossed in a World War 2 battle enactment with toy soldiers, you come along and add a toy cowboy thinking its just another toy, you have in fact just taken him out of his engrossment by introducing something that plainly doesn't belong in his fantasy play and so you break the spell he has constructed.

Best just to leave him to play, he knows the world he wants to create better than you.

ASDMommyASDKid, I forgot to also say, I am not sure that he can articulate the "why" of why he doesn't want the toy people in the vehicles/houses, etc. He is 24 months old and just started gaining language ( mostly single words).

I would venture it is anti-social, which why it feels safer to him, Social can equal scary. He may be using play in part to escape from real-life social demands. I don't think it is bad to let him do that, especially if he is making progress with real life socialization.

I could see where it might be thought that "playing" with people would make real life people less scary, but not being an expert in any way, I am not sure if it is wise to push it. If it is too much for him, you could be making him more resistant as opposed to less. We have always backed off when he showed a strong aversion, waited a month or two, and tried to reintroduce. After a few tries like that with Thomas, we tabled it until we saw him willingly enjoying it of his own volition.

So, I am not being critical, I am just kind of curious myself as to what the objective as far as the pros think and why it is prioritized. It may be a valid thing to do, it just sounds weird to me. Play should be fun.

Last edited by ASDMommyASDKid on 08 Oct 2013, 5:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What ever happened to play time being "just for fun?" If you keep forcing yourself, and your ideas into his imaginary games, then you are taking the fun out of it. In my opinion that is potentially more damaging than the fact that he doesn't like to have people figures included in his fantasy games. He probably peoples the toys with imaginary people, and doesn't need or want the real figures intruding on his fantasies. Why don't you ask him if he does do that? In the mean time, remember, the kid is barely 2 years old! He is just learning to play, and to interact with other people. From what you say, he does interact with real people, so lighten up already and get off his case!

I would not expect him to be able to articulate why. My son never told me his issues with Thomas. I could tell the face freaked him out.

Why are you trying to control the way your child thinks? If he doesn't like people figures, he doesn't like them. Is this some sort of Behavioral Therapy Psychological Torture, in which non-conformity to your template is unacceptable?

If you want to raise a child who is chronically depressed and suicidal because he feels that nothing he can ever do is going to be anything but a disappointment to everyone and there's something fundamentally WRONG with who he is, because every tiny thing he does has to be CORRECTED, then you're on the right track.

Why not get ahead of the game and have LOSER tattooed on his forehead now? Backwards, of course, so he can read it every time he looks in a mirror.

Or you could just love him for who he is and celebrate the fact that he thinks differently and has different likes and dislikes than the average, pedestrian dullard.

All I know is, this is the reason so many people on the High Functioning end of the Autism Spectrum refer to themselves as having been born onto the Wrong Planet. Because the rest of the world treats us like we don't belong here. Eventually you start to believe it.

Yup. It could be that the cars ARE the people!

Also, a word about lining up toys. It works like this. Imagine you just spent a few hours alphabetizing/organizing your CD collection, and then suddenly someone comes along and starts messing around with it. How would you feel?

Ok, to sum up:

Your baby was playing and you put a different toy in the toy.
Your baby removed the new toy.
You put it back.
The baby removed it again.
You put it back.
The baby removed it and expressed anger and frustration.

Your baby is being assertive. There is some pathology to this exchange but it is not on the part of the infant and it's not the baby who is acting antisocially.

Let your baby play and save the interventions for things that matter.

So true. Aspies and HFA's tend to create elaborate fantasy scenarios in their minds, some elaborate enough to rival SimCity 4. Trying to introduce what's essentially a foreign element ruins the game. The kid may be pretending to be a railroad engineer delivering food and fuel to a tiny remote town in Alaska, when all the roads where snowed in and a rail line is the only hope. By design, trains can pass through much deeper snow banks than trucks, so the kid is assuming the role of a hero. And there you (the OP) go, dumping a teddy bear into a freight train that's already packed to capacity with bread, salt pork, beans, rice, canned goods, winter clothes, and heating oil. Heck, if I were that age, I'd be furious! Of course, the only way I'd be able to show the anger is through crying, which parents interpret as resistance, causing them to try harder at introducing that bear, causing me to cry more, causing them to... a vicious cycle we got here.

I'll chime in with my personal story. I was much older than 2 years at the time, but anyway... When I was 6, I was going through a phase where I loved to reenact scenes from how-to shows on TV; mostly cooking shows, which my parents had no problem with me watching. One time, I happened to see a show teaching people how to make some kind of pie/brownie/cake/pastry thing. I don't remember what it was exactly, but I do remember that it had walnuts, flour, and cocoa powder in it. So I took three small bowls, each with a little bit of one ingredient: chopped walnuts, flour, and chocolate shavings that stood in for cocoa powder. I was in the middle of my game, getting ready to mix everything in a larger bowl, when...

...My parents' friends came over. We exchanged our hellos, and they started to poke fun at my game. One person went up to the folding table where I was sitting, ate the chocolate shavings and walnuts from the bowls, and said: "Thank you. That cookie was delicious." Everybody in the room laughed. What did I do? Take a wild guess . I started BAWLING!! ! Which made all adults laugh even harder. My parents had a moment of kindness (they'd usually just yell at me to stop crying or else): they promptly replaced the chocolate shavings and the walnuts, and told everyone to stay away from my table.

The only lesson I learned from that situation is this: don't get caught reenacting any food-related scenario that looks even remotely appealing to my parents' friends, or if someone just caught me, quickly wolf down or discard all food used in the game. Luckily, I was smart enough not to start another game like that unless I was super-sure no one was coming over that day. And if someone was coming over, I just sat and read a book or played solitaire with cards.

OK, wow, now I am feeling even more confused and a little defensive, I must say.
As I said, we are SO very new to this and just trying to make sense of it all. Maybe we are failing, judging by your comments I'd say we are but we are trying, trust me!

I see everybody's point and I do appreciate your input but is it not true that we NEED people for just about everything around us?? We NEED a pilot to fly a plane, right? The plane cannot fly itself! I didn't make this up - this is the reality of life.

Would he not feel worse if he was say a few years older, say 5 or 6, and all the other kids were playing with the people in the cars, etc and all he was doing (out of habit and repetition) was taking them out and then all the other kids started making fun of him or avoiding him - would this scenario, which in my mind is a real possibility, not be worse in the long run? Long-term planning is what I've got on my mind, I guess.