asperger kids have a lack of imaginitive play

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A lack. A lack.!?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA.

As a kid i was bursting with imagination. Even now i still do. It's even the first thing they noticed when i got diagnosed.
I think it's the best part about having aspergers, why i'd never want to be NT. I love seeing the world differently.
My life would've been completely different without it.

I certainly lack imagination even now. I didn't imagine myself in pictures or stories, nor had I imaginary friends. I only began to read fiction in my teens and even then I liked only some SF. I always had my twin sister beside me though, so we eventually engaged ourselves in imaginary play sometimes, like laying siege to a toy fortress made of rubbish, playing good indians and cowboys vs. bad indians with action figures (in Central Europe). However, we never played this way with our first lego, a Castle. She had a toy kitchen, a plate of fried chicken in it, and I was more interested in its look, taste and material than its function... I loved cars and I had a lot of them, I loved to toss them or just spin the wheels, especially those with a fly-wheel. They were carefully arranged in the wardrobe. I did sit in a card-box converted to a car though, and pretended I was driving it. Everything in this world had to work or do something in a way to be interesting to me. I was disappointed a little that this Castle lego not even had wheels... But, when I got my 744 builder set for my 9th birthday, I was so pleased I had been playing with it well into my teens.

I was always curious about the world around me, and this may deceive others that I show this interest, and I'm not always in my world like some other autistics. I always thought I lack imagination, and rather see things as they are, how they work in a purely material sense. An example of weird "material" imagination was when I assembled something totally nonworking from rubbish at a shed, an electrical circuit made partly of non-conducting materials and pretended (for myself) it worked... For many many years my interests excluded social relationships, and only later, much like Sherlock Holmes I become a social detective myself (similarly to Temple Grandin), still lagging behind.

Oh, I'm sure the idea behind the theory is perfectly "legit" with a twist.

I do think most people with autism are capable of vivid imagination.

I've met a lot of autistic kids who talked about imaginative worlds, characters or situations. Sometimes their imagination was very similar to something they've experienced before (seen on TV, read in a book) and sometimes they changed

But when you put these kids in a social situation (playing with other children) and tell them to "get creative" and demand that they absolutely do not base their play on their routines/their experiences/what they're used to and instead are to "go with what the other children want" they don't "connect" that well and struggle to "pick up on the clues as how to play the unfamiliar, unpredictable game".

And that's usually when teachers/parents/professionals point out some sort of "impaired imagination".

This was not true for me. I had two modes of play one was organizing, sorting, building etc., but the other included quite imaginative play.

Of course some of what I was playing was unusually scientific or knowledgeable and it was disturbing to my father.

I was wired in a strange way for a child and it seemed in part that I was supercharged to express my gender and in some ways...do it in a way that was much older than my biological age. I can lol now, but I used to get in trouble for it. Somehow I clearly knew what sex was at about 2 years old. I knew what it entailed and how it was done but I can not attach this information to anything I can recall seeing. I do not know how I knew, but I would also get others to act out conception and then become the baby swimming around inside my mother. My father was mortified, to say the least. I had actual crushes on grown men. As I got older (around 7 or , I would put pillows under my shirt and stand in front of a mirror to see what I'd look like pregnant. That of course was also disturbing to him. I would talk about how I wanted breasts and was tired of being flat chested. lol I made lists of names for my imaginary children. I would draw them and color them and sometimes cut out outfits from a magazine and draw a child to fit the outfit. I had to hide these activities and thoughts as this was, in my father's view an unhealthy special interest, although I didn't actually ever do anything sexually inappropriate. It was innocent expression of something natural, but it wasn't viewed that way.

I would also play Mermaids. I would walk miles to the beach and build the whole city of Atlantis along the shore with sand and try to decide the best mermaid name for myself and write my name in the sand in fancy letters. I'd make necklaces and crowns from Seaweed. I would hold back the sea with my imaginary powers. I almost drown in an actual seaside cave once searching for treasure when the tide came in.

I don't actually think I lacked anything, I just expressed it in strange ways.

I remember that I often surrounded myself with my plush animals, all neatly lined up, and just sat there and made up stories about them. In my fantasy world, they were real, talking animals that I went on all kinds of adventures with.

Later at school age, I was fascinated by superheroes. I wasn't allowed to buy comic books, but I sometimes read them at the magazine shelf in stores. At home, I drew my own superheroes. I made up costumes and logos and invented power sets for them. I also tried to create costumes for myself, made masks out of paper and used towels as capes.

The toy cars and playmobil sets that I got for xmas and birthdays could never keep my interest for long, and I often just took them apart to see how they fit together and then tried to build something different with the parts. I always needed to do something creative, so I definitely didn't lack imagination. And I read a lot. Illustrated encyclopedias, my parent's Reader's Digest collection, everything I could get my little hands on

It's not a theory, as it comes from direct observations of children by clinicians.

Then it's a silly diagnostic criteria, the point still stands.

I think to say that AS kids express imaginative play differently than NT kids is probably more accurate. The offspring acts out stories and dramas with her stuffed buddies and I don't remember doing that. I spent more time arranging them by species, I think. Of course, when she was really small, she'd spend hours lining up her toy cars. Once, one of her friends who is her age and AS came over on a fairly regular basis and they spent hours lining up toy cars with each other. Neither of my siblings is the picture of NT and they're the ones I played most often with. I remember a lot of imagination in how we played together, but maybe we didn't play like other kids? I dunno.

I used to play games of tecmo super bowl by myself out in the yard when I was a kid. I would also regularly pretend that I was a character from a videogame or favorite tv show and act out the things they did. When I went to the pool, I'd pretend I was megaman, going thru bubbleman's stage. Sometimes I'd go to the deep end and cling to one of the walls. Then I'd jump down, bounce back up, moving to the side, and cling to the wall again, pretending I was spiderman web slinging and climbing skyscrapers. Sometimes too, I'd make it look like I hit my head, and then I'd act like I didn't know where or who I was. Sometimes I'd act like I honestly thought I was somebody else to try and see if I could convince my friends... Lack of imaginative play, my as*hole...

I had a sort of imaginative play when I was little, only it didn't involve dolls (considering my female gender) as I used to find these boring and generally useless. I'd say my playing with other children was somewhat circumscribed (I loved to replay sci-fi movies, but not soaps or any kind of romance movies, and I wanted to play them 'in the right way', that is, as close as possible to the original) and would break down as soon as a book would come into sight. I do lack imagination now but only when the area is unknown to me, in fields I am familiar with I can be very creative.

I did a lot of that growing up. I played with dolls, played house and school, pretended my bike was a car, drew towns in the middle of the street and pretended it was a real town and my bike was my car, I played with toy cars and my brothers action figures, Polly Pockets and my brother's Mighty Max toys. I also played in the sand box and make towns in them. I think my pretend play may have been different than normal kids because I can remember my rigid ways of playing and one of them was lining things up and at times my imaginative play be normal so it was both. I also did role playing with my Barbie dolls about things in real life. Like if I saw something in real life, I would go home and act it out with my dolls. I don't know if this was normal play or unusual. But that';s what mom told me, I would always act it out with my dolls first before doing the behavior so how I be playing with my dolls was always a red flag for her because it would indicate I saw something that was wrong and I was confused and soon I would be doing it too.

Hmmm...both I and my AS daughter engaged in imaginative play...the imagined things were often unusual compared to NT kids, but a LACK of imaginative play? Nope.

~Kate

I got it: Generally autistics do not lack imagination while playing at all, however the hyperintroverted tendencies of autism that lead to the name lead to Autistics doing most of the imagining in their head, not expressing it. This means they probably actually tend to have more imagination than most kids, but since they don't express it the silly out of date researchers assume it's not there. This appears to be a reoccurring pattern with autistic traits, everything from emotion to cognitive abilities.