asperger kids have a lack of imaginitive play

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My daughter's imaginative play is excellent. Every night, she and her Daddy crawl about the floor, with her Transfomers, Lego figures, etc. All have their own voices and a multitude of stories. In fact, I think her imagination is more advanced than most kids her age. Maybe it's a little different from most 6yr old girls, but it's definitely not inferior. I watched her in the dentist's waiting room yesterday, playing with the toys on the floor, no problems making up stories at all. An elderly couple looked on and smiled at her and her Daddy and a little girl and her Mum just stared, as if she was doing something weird (she's 6 but looks about 8 or 9). Last week, I bumped into a Mum I knew from a toddler group we used to go to. She told me her son was waiting to be assessed properly for autism (probably Aspergers too). She happened to say the very same thing about him, especially compared to his older brothers, who are NT.

I've always been told I have an over-active imagination. I think the main difference with me and my peers when I was a child is that their play would be 'standardised'. In other words, if they had a post office set, they would play post office, and if they had a school set they would play school, and so on, whereas I would take the toys out of their context and make up my own worlds. I used to place myself in other worlds too, and create a whole scenario around that idea too, whereas all the other kids would only imagine themselves in pre-defined worlds (such as Rainbow Brite, Mario World etc). They all had dolls that 'wet' and 'burped' and I hated those dolls because they were too restrictive - my dolls were always normal dolls that didn't have special gimmicks because I could imagine them in any context.

Like some other people here have mentioned, I had strict rules too (even if they only made sense to me), and would get really upset if someone broke them.

Clearly it's not the case for everyone, but I do think there's some truth to it. Not that imagination is lacking completely, rather it's expressed very differently. That's how it was for me at least.
I had an imagination as a child but preferred to play alone. I would spend hours dressing Barbie dolls and setting up houses for them, etc. But, I would never act out a story and I imagine to an outsider it just looked like I was dressing them over and over and rearranging for no reason when in reality, I had very elaborate stories in my head, that I saw no need to say out loud. I thought it was kind of silly even then, and as I got older I reasoned that I thought that because the other kids looked silly playing and talking out loud. Then again, maybe I was just taught not to expose anything I was doing because my mom would ridicule me for it, and learned to keep all the fun thoughts to myself.
That's a common theme in all the play I did as a child, though. It was always about preparing and arranging and planning for things, and it's still something I love to do and am good at.

I had imaginative play in spades. I also had no problem with invented scenarios with toys. In fact, it seemed to me that other kids had problems comprehending toys.

For example, I would make a plastic dinosaur the "king" of whatever world I invented. He could talk too.

Kid: "Dinosaurs don't talk and they can't be kings!"

Me: "Real dinosaurs can't talk or be kings. This is a TOY."

I suspected that other kids who couldn't tell the difference between toys and real dinosaurs were a tad dense.

I definitely lacked in the imaginative play area. Dolls and stuffed animals were only useful for dressing up or doing their hair. When I babysat kids my lack of imaginative play sometimes made things hard. So the kids were bored playing house or dolls with me.

I played imaginative play well with other children. The only thing I did seem to struggle with was playing games like You're It or Hide & Seek, those sorts of games. Well, I did enjoy them, but I always had suspicions of other kids cheating, and I always ended up getting angry, then if I lost any games I would get upset and sulk. I did grow out of that by around the age of 11, and learned to co-operate better.

Otherwise, I didn't have much trouble with playing games with other children. For an Aspie, I was actually quite good at playing imaginative games with other children. The ones who were worst at co-operating properly in imaginative games were kids who didn't have any brothers or sisters.

I am fairly certain this theory about ASD kids not having imaginative play is just biased garbage that confirms the idea that non-autistic people are "good", "right", and autistics are "bad" and "weird." My imagination was all that kept me going as a child. When I did play with friends, it almost always involved developing and playing with highly imagined, novel scenarios... though they were almost always about space exploration

I spend hours playing using my imagination. I never even heard this, even after I was diagnosed. My mom did state that I never did the "playing house" that "normal" kids usually do. I also scared off most of the play dates she tried to set up. I was happy alone, and I always thought my adventures with bad guys, detectives looking for clues and hero saving the way was WAY more fun than the "welcome home honey!" crud

I'm NT (my son is AS), but I think my imaginative play may have been limited as a child. My mother reports that I was never interested in dolls, and the only good thing about Barbie was the elevator in her townhouse. (A fascination with that elevator seems to be common among us female engineers!) From 2nd grade on all I wanted to do was read -- before that I spent a lot of time listening to books on records that would play a chime to tell you to turn the page.

I tried playing action figures with my son, to encourage the development of his play skills, and nothing could be more boring to me than trying to make up a story and make these toys talk.