The 10-year-old boy in Glendale, CA who threw his teddy bear

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My name is Mark and I am 25 and have as. Did anyone hear on the news Saturday about the 10-year old boy in Glendale California who while throwing a temper tantrum threw his teddy bear over a guardrail down a cliff and his parents almost got killed going down it to rescue it? Firefighters rescued them and brought them back to their vehicle, but the bear was not found and a neighbor brought him another teddy bear. Most of the blogs are ridiculing the boy and his parents for spoiling him, but i was relieved to hear someone suggest he could be autistic. I have had tears about this all weekend and have been trying to find out more about this and the parents' last names hoping to contact them to encourage them to try finding the bear. Below is a blog I posted. Does attachment to a teddy bear by an older child seem typical of as or autism? Can someone comfort me in regard to my own childhood attachment stated below and whether my mom should have thrown away the teddy bear me and my brother liked to play with and pretend was real? even though that was 12 years ago and i am 25 now i still go on teddy bear sites hoping i might find a bear that looked exactly like our Teddy and i still glance at bears when i am in stores that sell them. what i cant get over for the rest of my life is my embarrassment that such an attachment occurred in the first place when i was 10-11 years old and my grief when my mom threw Teddy away. I really think she should have asked us nicely to give it up to her and she could put it away in the attic or something, but she was looking for an excuse to throw it away because i had gotten too attached so one day when me and brother were fighting and he was bending Teddy's head back to make me angry she came upstairs and said 'that thing's going in the garbage.' i could have died when i heard those words. then later that night when she was trying to console us, she said "teddys going to be having a new adventure [in the junkyard]. just those words made me cry even though i was intelligent enough to know the bear was not real, but he had been my playmate for over 2 years and my brother got it as a baby. is the fact that i am in tears now reflecting on this experience and thinking about the boy Soki (i think thats his name)'s embarassment and sorrow typical of aspergers? please help me on this.

here's the blog i wrote:

I hope the teddy bear can be found and rescued too. While the boy will probably be embarrassed this happened for the rest of his life, I feel terrible for him because I too was attached to a teddy bear shortly after that age for a couple of years due to emotional and family problems. I wish the news had shown the parents' full names so I could try contacting them to encourage someone to find the bear. I was in tears reading about this since it reminded me of my childhood attachment. I am moderately autistic which i think is why i got infatuated with a teddy bear around age 11, and my mom threw it away 2 years later which devastated me; she was looking for an excuse to because i was so attached to it. I would pretend the bear was real and had a voice for it to play with my brother. I wanted to die for almost a year afterwards, both from the loss of that bear and from the embarrassment in the first place of becoming attached to it at that age. I know many think that boy deserves what he got and that 10 is too old to be playing with a bear, but it gave me comfort knowing I was not alone. His parents cared about his feelings and knew he was doing something he'd regret later, whereas my mom didn't think about how throwing away my teddy bear would affect me the rest of my life. Any feedback welcome. autistic young adult in maryland

My son is 11 and has AS. He is very smart academically, but still likes stuffed animals and is like a little boy sometimes. We got our 3 year old an elf magic stuffed elf before Christmas, and our son kept wanting us to order him one too. He really really wanted one too he said. After a few days he forgot about it, but some boys (I think especially AS boys) still live in a world that is younger than their age. I was actually tempted to buy him one if he had persisted a little longer.

I still have some of my old dinosaurs from the 1960s by the way.

I have by my bed my old snoopy dog that I was so attached to as a child. I remember once we dropped it out of our family car and my brother and I cried and cried until we turned around and scooped it out of the street again. I remember loving snoopy dog passionately and whispering in his droopy ear my secrets of my girlish soul. I have my stuffed animal near my bed, although I don't have even a slight twinge anymore of that dedication to him nowI keep him there so I can remember to let go of other things I obsess about, because that obsession has a life of its own, and isn't the real me. Its just the obsession that had its hold on me, not the object/person its self.

I hope this helps you, too.

Merle

I doubt that the Fire Dept was able to extricate the parents noggins from their rectums. It's good that the brat knows that his parents are willing to risk their lives to cater to what ever temper tantrum he wants to have. I'm sure the rest of the world will do the same for him if he ever moves out on his own.

I wish I still had my teddy. I re-found him at my parents place when I was about 40. We had a happy reunion and slept together again, but later I did the grown up thing later and chucked him away. I didn't know it was ok to keep your teddy until later (thanks to the internet) when I realised others do.

Last edited by Postperson on 26 Jan 2009, 4:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

I asked thisquestion of some NTs:

"What is the thing you hold most dear?"

Mostly, they responded in kind.. "My child/children."

So I asked:

"What would you do if someone took your child away, for no other reason than you were attached to him/her? Or arbitrarily decided you were too old/young to have a child? Or worse yet, just 'because'? "

Invariably they responded in kind:

"I wouldnt let them." " I would fight/kill them" "I would do everything in my power to stop them."

"And how would you feel if this happened?" I asked...

"Shocked, upset, unable to carry on" came the replies.

"These are reactions we would all expect to see. They are quite normal".

"That said" Says I "Why in the name of jesus do People have such a problem when autistic kids throw a wobbler because you took away their coat/brick/blanket/bear? It feels the same to us, we care about these things as much, if not more so. So how about cutting us some slack? Show me ANYONE who does not get upset if their favourite thing in the whole wide world is taken from them. Our reaction and desire is QUITE NORMAL. Its just the item of our affection that seems odd.. and note well dear listener.. its NOT ODD TO US"

Macbeth very well said, I so agree with what you put. The anger and frustration is mostly the misunderstood difference, we are meant to act, conform and fit into a NT stereo type world and often that makes us feel like ducks out of water, and all everyone does is complain and want to cure us for being differently able... no wonder some of us shout out now and again, but pointless as rather than listen far to often we get given another label!

At least his parents understood how important his teddy was to him, when younger I would of been more upset losing my special toy than a real person, as so many made my life unintentionally more difficult....

When I was a child I had an alligator, and I would have freaked if I lost it. My parents would have never tried to retrieve it for me, they would have told me it was my own fault. I don't know that I would have gone over a cliff for just any toy, but if my son lost his Thomas Pillow or his blanket I probably would have tried really hard to get that for him. I understand that attachment. Macbeth is right, any kid could have acted that way, and it's understandable. This thing is as real as any person. I was the same way when I was a child over my alligator (which I still have by the way, I'm 43) My NT nephew had a blanket from when he was a baby that he still sleeps with (he's 30) and used to take it to sleepovers when he was a teenager, and he took it to college with him. There are NT people out there who get it. I wish for you guys there were more.

I am a 19 year old with aspergers and I am still attached to my wolf stuffed animal. I still sleep with my stuffie and bring him along with me when I am away from home for a while. My parents don't seem to care much that I am still attached to a stuffed animal.

Depending on the cliff, it sounds like this is a challenge serious climbers might like: rescue that bear! (And have a nice day out rock climbing while you're at it.)

I was seriously attached to my bunny dog until mom threw him out when I was four. Then as an adult I got attached to a stuffed animal I'd been given by some kids I babysat. I left him behind in Ottawa when I moved west and still regret it. I wonder if the woman I left him with still has him, or if she gave him to someone, or if she threw him out.

They already risked their lives once to find the bear. Perhaps the next time they would find the bear, then fall off the cliff and die. I don't think it's a wise suggestion.

I know sometimes you can get something stuck in your head, and you keep thinking, "I just have to make things right". But the boy in this story may not even be autistic. Maybe the boy hated the bear but it was an heirloom from one of the grandparents that the mom or dad wanted to save. I don't know the whole story, and neither do you. Try your best just to forget about it, because getting all worked up is not going to be good for you.

I've always liked plush toys. That's probably why I love plus sized women!

When I was born I was given a soft lamb toy that played nursery rhymes when you wound it up. I'm 23 and still have it. I remember when I was 10 I would still have it on my bed.

i still have lots of cuddly toys and i'm 27. i don't think i'm obsessed by them at all, but i still like them & won't even think about chucking them out.

i think lots of NT's, especially girls, still like them, but they just won't admit it in public because its seen as childish. its nice to have something to cuddle