What Is Pathological About "Playing With Parts of Objec

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How is that harmful?

I've read on some sites parents describing things like "inappropriate behavior such as playing with parts of objects"

What's inappropriate about it unless the object or parts are dangerous(in which case you'd handle it the same as with an NT kid, take it away and replace it with a safe alternative)?

I also see sometimes we are described as "preferring to play with parts of objects instead of forming relationships"

To me that looks like a big FALSE DICHOTOMY. Why can't a person enjoy doing both or even combine them? Taking apart and putting together things can be a group activity. It seems like that is worded in a way as to assume that there is something inherently anti-social about wanting to play with parts of objects. I suppose they don't consider it social behavior unless it's NT-favored activities like gossiping and talking about celebrities.

What makes up all our modern gadgets and technological conveniences? Parts. If nobody ever enjoyed playing with them they would have never been invented. There's plenty of great inventors on the spectrum who I'm certainly glad never got over "playing with parts of objects".

This gives me the impression there are probably a lot of parents out there who are wasting time with behavioral interventions that target aspects of autism that aren't harmful and are only automatically thought of as harmful by association to the real problems.

They even have a movie, Toy Story which depicts this behavior as evil. In real life taking apart and putting back together toys in creative ways isn't evil at all. Poor Sid could've been a great inventor but got traumatized by animated toys and will likely grow up with some serious mental issues. The only thing he does wrong is destroy his sister's doll. But that's just typical big brother being mean to his little sister.

Maybe more kids with autism would do better if parents would focus on things that are actually problems like teaching social skills, dealing with oversensitivity issues, etc...

I suppose I can see one way this could be a problem. If the objects aren't toys or are a sibling's toy. Obviously you don't want your kid going around dismantling all the devices in the house. Although I suppose there's worse things. At least that's educational. If I have a kid on the spectrum and that becomes a problem I'll make sure he has enough of his own toys to "sid" with to his heart's content, and maybe even let the kid take apart and put together appliances if its not too dangerous and its under my supervision so I can make sure it goes back the way its supposed to be.

What they are talking about is playing with the parts instead of playing with the whole thing. For example, if given a toy car, an NT child will typically put it to the ground and make 'vroom vroom' sounds, while an autistic kid might start spinning the tires. So the NT child is relating to the object as a 'car', while the autistic kid is relating to it as 'tires'.

I agree that there is nothing inappropriate about this. It's just a different style of playing. But many people think anything that's different about autistics is something bad.

Would say nothing unless its part of a person or animal, playing with someones kidney...possibly psychotic or scientific.

P.S. I agree everyone likes spinning toy car tires, do think every bloke likes doing that, never saw a woman do it though.

I don't see it as an impairment either. I just don't get it. They call it such because it's "not normal." What if the child also played with the car and with the wheels? Are they going to tell the child to stop playing with the wheels and just play with the car?

I also know it means taking photos of objects like when you snap a photo of a person, you are snapping a photo of their earrings they have on or their glasses or their nose or mouth and when you snap photos of a door, you may snap a photo of a door knob and really how is that wrong? I suppose it be an impairment if they were supposed to be taking photos for people and instead all they got were pictures of noses or mouths or close up of peoples clothes or objects instead of the whole picture. No one wants that stuff, not even me. I would be expecting photos of my wedding of the whole pictures, not close ups or any objects only and that would peeve me and make me mad and would never want to use that person again as a photographer. To me it's all a waste of space and if I want to see that stuff, I would go see it in person.

Also when you are taking movies and you keep on zooming in on peoples mouths or faces or their ears or other objects in the room, I can see why that be an impairment because no one wants to see all the zooming in and out and even I don't want to keep on seeing it. Mom got mad at me when I was taking a movie of a sign at the Burlington Arcade in London and she told me to delete that off the movie and I said I would but forgot so it ended up being in the movie and she was not impressed. I still don't understand why it upset her so much, it was just a sign and I thought it was interesting so I took a movie of it. I don't know if that counts as parts of objects but it sure upset my mother. Oh no a few seconds of the sign ruined the whole movie.


Oh yeah I didn't like Sid but I know the whole point of the movie was telling from the toys point of view. To them Sid was bad and he was a villain but for the toys, not for the humans. They did something similar in Toy Story 3, they made the toddlers evil because they played too rough with the toys and would break them but yet they were not the villains, the teddy bear was. I never ruined my toys or took them apart because I had passion for them and never wanted them broken. I am sure Sid was just a typical child and he liked taking his toys apart and remaking them and he was portrayed as a villain because it was told from the toys point of view. I also imagined he ends up being at the doctors because no one would believe him that the toys are alive and come to life and they all think he is crazy and he never wants to touch toys again nor play with them or even get near them. That be an interesting fanfiction to write. My little brother thought his bedroom was cool. I thought it was ugly.

I suppose taking things apart be an impairment if they kept taking things apart around the home and wrecking them and doing it to other peoples toys. But I would encourage the parents to buy them things for them from Goodwill or yard sales for them to take apart and tell them the rest of the stuff in the home and everywhere else is off limits to them to take apart and they can only take their own stuff apart. I have relatives who also took stuff apart to see how it works. My husband was the same way too when he was little because he loved electronics and still does and he quit doing it because his family kept getting mad at him about it. They wouldn't work again is why so of course they had a good reason to be pissed about it.

The trouble isn't that you're interested in small details; it's that the small details catch your attention so much that you can't see the big picture. By the time you're old enough to post on Internet forums you've generally figured out how to put together those details--laboriously and carefully, but put them together nonetheless. Still, some problems usually remain. For example, a detail-focused person may have a tendency toward "cognitive perfectionism" (my term for it), in which you are incapable of completing a task in any way but "perfect" or "undone". Knowing how to cut corners where you can is actually a useful skill. Another problem is the tendency to keep using the same strategy even though it doesn't work, because you are focused on carrying out that strategy and aren't looking at the big picture which would reveal that this strategy will not be successful. Having a very small-scale focus is not "pathological" so much as it is at the extreme end of the scale from big-picture to detail focused thinking. Being at the extreme end of the scale can cause problems with problem-solving. Spinning the wheels on a toy car is an indicator because the child doesn't see the toy car as an analogue for a real car (the thing is much smaller than a real car, and the child would have to be able to compare the whole toy to the whole car in order to see the resemblance and put "toy car" in the same category as "car"). It means that the child has problems integrating the details into a meaningful whole, which is a cognitive trait associated with autism.

So, no, spinning wheels on toy cars isn't pathological; there'd be no point in trying to prevent a child from doing it, and there's no harm in it (nor is there any use in teaching the child to play with the car "properly", because if he can't make the car/toy-car connection he probably can't make the driving/pretend-driving connection either). It's just an indicator of a cognitive trait that is common among many autistic people.

I wish more doctors understood this. Many autism specialists do, but many therapists and generalist child psychologists don't have a clue about why spinning wheels on toy cars and such is an indicator of autism and what it means about how the child thinks.

For me, playing with parts of objects developed from focusing on single parts into multiple parts into moar and moar and moar parts until I processed large numbers of parts all at once to be able to see the whole made of the parts, but my perception and cognition are still part-oriented, almost always starting from the parts and building up to the whole. One notable eggseption is my seeing of things that look like snakes. On the ground, twigs that looks like snakes, ropes that look like snakes, actual snakes, are processed as wholes, so I don't see the details of the twigs, ropes, and snakes before I see the whole things that look like snakes. This eggseption to my normal part-oriented processing is probably due to my fear of snakes and deep desire to avoid them at all times.

No, they'd still meet that part of the criteria.

You can have an autistic trait without impairment, and still have it "count" toward your diagnosis, as long as all your traits together cause impairment.

This is true of many diagnostic categories. For example, one of the criteria for a major depressive episode is "significant weight loss or gain, without deliberate dieting". Significant can mean ten pounds in two months, depending on what weight you were to begin with. There's no impairment associated with losing or gaining ten pounds unless you're severely underweight to begin with; but because the symptom is present, it counts toward diagnosis.

The "impairment" criterion gets applied after you tally up the symptoms and get enough of them for a diagnosis: If you're not impaired, no diagnosis, and if you are, then you get a diagnosis.

My oldest son is NT and took every toy he owned apart. I mean every single one of them even computerized toys and stereos. There were parts everywhere. He also put them back together in odd creative Sid-like ways.

My little boy, who I suspect has autism, likes to spin the wheels and put the cars in a line. He hasn't taken any of his toys apart yet.

I agree. I think when the experts are talking about playing with parts of a toy, they mean that the child just finds the spinning of a wheel more interesting than rolling the entire toy car across the floor and making car motor sounds.

I felt sorry for Sid too, by the way.

I find these references to pulling toys apart interesting. I rarely pulled my toys apart, probably for the same reason that an early interest in electronics was directed instead to computer programming - my fingers were too clumsy to follow my brain's orders, and breaking something was (and is) The Worst Thing In The World. Some of you will have heard that spectrumites tend to be "catastrophisers"; breaking things was (and is) one of my "catastrophes".

The criteria are geared towards children and what's important to know is:

that playing is a fundamental part of childhood development, especially so in the areas of social interaction and adaptive skills.

For example, playing is extremely important in learning to adapt with surprising changes and unexpected turns of events. (Which, incidentally, is an impairment of ASDs.) Normal people learn to accept and more importantly, learn to keep on functioning through minor unexpected events.

Playing is a key point of early childhood in learning to deal with stress. Dealing with an unexpected turn of events initiated by a friend a child plays with (a friend becoming upset, a friend wanting to buy chocolate at the child's pretended pet store, another kid misusing the child's toy unasked), a toy breaking or the child ending up breaking something else during their play, the child imagining a situation that happened to them or to someone else (if they change role during play) that they're witnessed and in which the child or the other person experienced great distress (the child told off by a teacher, parents arguing with each other, a stranger on the street bitten by a dog, a huge fire truck outside honking and startling the child, being dragged on a shopping tour through a noisy shopping centre or having overheard that fires burn down houses and kills people and trying to understand what that means).

Generally, playing positively (and greatly so) affects the ability to focus and imagine and, of course, move (motor abilities), it helps learning and understanding objects (that are played with or that are pretended), it improves the ability to listen to sounds and language and speak/narrate... that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

It's also a main source to learn from experience when it comes to using yet unfamiliar "things" to do yet unfamiliar actions. What I mean is experimenting. (Couldn't think of the word.) A child's way of playing is usually full of learning of the world he or she lives in by experimenting with it and trying new things out (on a very basic level, this includes tasting things never meant to be eaten and on a more complex level can mean starting to learn a musical instrument by creating awful "melodies" out of curiosity).

When children play, they don't just do meaningless activities to gain pleasure, but they also learn. Pretty decent of nature, combining pleasure with a massive amount of stuff that one needs to learn as early in life as possible.

Children who literally cannot play because they are not allowed to, because of sickness/hunger or because they're locked up (I mean, this is super rare around this part of the world but it happens) they miss on on extremely important milestones

So, if a kid seriously spends hours continuously spinning a fan in a repetitive or pulling a scarf around a bottle in ever the exact same movement, then there's nothing harmful or dangerous about the actions themselves... but that's just not much learning time actively spent on adapting to this world and supporting neurological development (especially the kind requiring many different stimuli to be perceived) even if said child is very observant of his or her surroundings during this extreme form of repetitive behaviour.

Allowing an autistic kid to calm down and relax by repetitive "play" is perfectly fine. I dare say that these prolonged periods of rest filled with repetitive actions are really, really important for autistic people to give them the chance to process what has happened and give their brains the chance to keep on adapting and learning from all that has happened before. Normal breaks from playing and new stimuli/new discovered which all children require often don't do much to help autistic kids relax if during these periods of time they're kept from calming down in their own special repetitive ways.

I never understand how some teachers totally go like "I know how to treat my autistic student the right way! I'm so knowledgeable when it comes to autistic behaviours" and then glare at their student, stop them or even slap their hands when they do something repetitive, then add "stop doing this, you're supposed to stay still and relax now/you're supposed to focus on...". Right.

When those repetitive "games" are overly simple and persist for several hours or the entire day (or are more complex but have also been repeated every day for months/years) then those can also interfere with active "typical" form of learning. Although I'd find pulling a scarf around a bottle for an hour and then twiddling a thread in a corner for half an hour to a full hour very mind-numbing, another person might need that between eating with other people and half a day of socialisation or work. If that's all someone did, then there's probably something wrong and someone should investigate (they might be hurt, have some serious untreated co-morbid disorders that affect them/their ability to interact with their surrounding and with people, in discomfort, on (medically prescribed) drugs, literally addicted to the pleasure/stimulation, resistant in combination with something else such as discomfort or fear or trauma...)

With elaborate repetitive behaviour there is no or very little time left during the day to acquire important self-help/appetitive skills such as dressing, toilet "training" outside of earl childhood", crossing a street, learning to respond to simple questions about basic needs or to focus on and acquire other skills or knowledge such as learning to read and write, physics, higher maths as well as social learning. Alternatively, a child/teen or adult manages to make time for these other things but very greatly struggles to because of the stress of keeping themselves from their repetitive actions (including spending time with parts of objects) and interests.

It's essential that autistic people can spend time on all the possible forms of repetitive behaviours (definitely keeps my brain from over-firing, keeps my senses from going astray and bye-bye and keeps my stress level on a physically no-harm-not-going-to-die level) but the symptom itself can cause significant impairment either by its (socially very problematic) nature or its extreme persistence and duration. (and only then should be paid attention to in my opinion)