Stacking Behavior in Autistic Children

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Does anyone know of any evidence that any parents have a problem with it? It's a very strange thing to have a problem with. I have a picture of me when I was little, stacking small cornflake boxes.

I wouldn't mind stacking some hundred dollar bills.

Hey, didn't Scrooge McDuck spend endless hours stacking his gold coins? He must be an Aspie.

Like the video says, the stacking often is viewed as cute by parents but as it persists they tend to become progressively more concerned about it. Thus, I do not think that a parent starts out with a reaction like OMG my kid is stacking. It also seems that the diagnosis itself makes many parents hypersensitive to things like stacking.

LG

Thanks to both my stacking obsession, and my obsession with collecting records, particularly 45s and 78s, as a kid I had stacks of small records that reached nearly from floor to ceiling. My mum wouldn't've minded much if not for the fact that I also played them daily, which meant I spent a good amount of time un-stacking and re-stacking them.

I like to stack autistic children. The trouble is, so few of them will cooperate.

My (Aspie) son loves to stack things and line things up. It doesn't usually bother me, but once in a while he gets so rigid about it that if anyone in the house comes within feet of the stack/line he flips out. Then, I have to admit, it does get challenging. But usually I just ask him to move to his bedroom and close the door and he doesn't mind. The exception is when some underlying stress is causing him to be unusually rigid, in which case he even gets rigid about WHERE he does his lining up/stacking...then a lot of deep breaths and counting to ten are involved (on my part). He has three siblings, all under the age of 5, and our house isn't huge so it's nearly impossible to keep everyone a few feet away from his creations.

As an interesting aside, my 2yo NT daughter also loves to arrange/line up her toys and is really rigid about them being moved and touched. This one trait of hers screams Aspie, but that is the only AS trait she has.

Yes, NT kids do it sometimes, too. But normally they do it as part of their play. In other words, the goal isn't to arrange, it's to eventually play with the toys somehow. It seems to me that kids with AS do it just for the love of the visual effect it creates. The stacking/arranging is the goal.