Do you remember obsessive interests as a child?

Post Reply New Topic

Okay, the ones I can remember right now when I was either in elementary school or younger:

Snoot (the seal in "the Fun Factory show")
The 3 little pigs
the baby sister of a playmate
England
trains (we used to live near a railroad)
dinosaurs
animals, (my pets, particular species of animals)
the ethnical group called Sami
astronomy
Skippy (and Sonny and his way of life, which I really envied)
monsters and the paranormal
the Famous 5
Super Mario bros 1
Denmark
collecting cars
a little row boat that lay on the shore of the lake we lived by when I was little

For some reason when i was 10 I had a lot of obsessions. More obsessions as a kid that year than an other year. My primary obsession was (and still is) guns but as always there were temporary but strong sub-obsessions that came along one at a time.
That year it was freight trains, old typewriters, vintage cars, and fire extinguishers/firefighting equipment.
I pretty much kept the old typewriter and fire extinguisher thing to myself because even then I knew it twas nutty as hell.
For the other two I was fairly open about since they weren't as weird. I loved to see long freight trains roll by to the point where it exited me deeply. Anything having to do with trains, especially locomotives, held my undivided attention. During the old car obsession there was a car show in town that we went to and I was in absolute heaven walking around and gawking at all those old cars.

I still have obsessions with things but now at least I know why.

I can only remember three obessions from my childhood: lego, dinosaurs and The x-files.
The x-files was the worst one, I drove everyone around me crazy. I just wasn't a fan. I really was trying to become Fox Mulder.
So weird. I still really really really love the show and everything x-file.

OddDuck,

I did the same thing with the roller coasters at Cedar Point when I was in middle school!! !

My interests were dinosaurs/Jurassic Park in elementary school, as well as music from Disney movies, and roller coasters and paranormal phenomena in middle school. From high school on, it has been mostly tv shows, musical artists, or computer games.

Hi analyser23. I thought I would respond because I find special intense interests a fascinating topic. I am a male and I was deeply involved (and still am) in my special intense interests. Before I go on, please note that special intense interests are but one of a group of criteria in the DSM-IV or other diagnostic tools. You don't have to have everyone of the criteria. You must have so many under each category in order to have Asperger's.

My main special intense interests are roller coasters and house plans. As a youth I obsessed over them---and I still do. By the time I graduated from high school I had collected so many house plan books I couldn't count them. Today, I collect blueprints for houses. As a child I lived roller coasters---even taking amusement park books to school. Today I collect blueprints for roller coasters and am in the process of building HO scale models of some.

As an adult I have begun writing a novel. It is centered around houses I obsessed over as a child that I now have blueprints for. And there is an amusement park in the novel.

I can remember when I was around kindergarten age standing on the back porch peering out into the yard imagining a vast amusement park with fabulous rides amongst Mom and Dad's large maple trees. Sometimes I would set stuff up in the backyard like little rides---even setting up the turnstiles for the line. I preferred this type of activity to friends. Friends could get in the way of my world. Even though I had some friends I really liked, I preferred my private time with my special intense interests.

As I said before, special intense interests are not needed to have a diagnosis of Asperger's (at least not to my knowledge), but many of us do have them.

Relax with your diagnosis process. It isn't that stressful of a process.

Interesting how many people were obsessed with Greek myths, I was too! I had a book that I loved reading over and over again....and, when I visit my parent´s house, I still like to read it sometimes. (I was mostly interested in the Goddess Artemis).

As a child, I was also obsessed with: American Indians (there was a book that I asked my Dad to read over and over again. When he wasn´t reading the book, I was pretending to be the Indian chief); bugs, faeries, caterpillars, artwork/drawing, ancient Egypt (the time during the reign of the pharaoh Ramses the 2nd), Lord of the Rings, brain differences- (one phase where I was fascinated by, and studied, deafness/blindness; another phase when I was fascinated by retardation; and a 3rd phase when I was interested in schizophrenia). Eventually, at age 14, I became obsessed with ballet, which became my career.

Also, as a child, a lot of my obsessions were actually not "things" exactly, but ideas in my fantasy world. For instance, once my brother and I built a little town with blocks, cars, train tracks, etc. We named it, and made up this fantasy place. But whereas for him I think it was just a game that lasted for a few days, for me, it was a preoccupation of about 6 months to obsessively think about this Utopia, name all the various cities in my head, create a whole culture, history, cuisine, etc. etc. In fact, is incessant daydreaming about the same fantasy-subject something like a special interest? Because I did that as a child, too.

My mom told me I was obsessed with Barbies when I was little. I don't remember being obsessed with them. I played with them all the time and to her that was my obsession because that was all I ever did. I remember doing other things too. When I look back, most of my stuff was all Barbies. Things I got for Christmas be Barbies. Of course I got other things too like games or books or clothes, Polly Pockets.

But I can remember my other obsessions, even short ones. But almost all of my obsessions come from TV shows or movies.

I was obsessed with horses and Charlie Brown. I somehow found a way to incorporate horses into nearly everything I did. I had horse books, too. I read Black Beauty many times and would act out scenes in it, pretending to be Ginger because Black Beauty had to be male. I drove everyone crazy with talk of horses.
I did have Barbies, but I pretended the long hair was a horse's tail. I also enjoyed giving Barbie a hair cut.
One thing that fascinated me was the horses mane and how it was braided. I read steeple chasers had their manes in braids and when I saw photos of their manes, they didn't look like any braids I have ever seen. I was expecting them to hang down and look a bit woven, you know, like braids that girls with long hair wore to school.
The steeple chaser's braided mane was always in little knots on the top line of the neck. I wondered all the time how they managed to get so much mane in such a small knot. I would ask people, they didn't know the answer to my question. I would try to do the same thing to Barbie's hair, but it would end up making loops or something that looked like a bun. Even when I used less hair, I still ended up with something that was too loopy.
So, I did have an obsession with horses, but it's been brought to my attention on wp that isn't really unsual and doesn't qualify as an unusual interest. Maybe it's a special interest, though.

I have read again and again that one of the main defining characteristics of AS is very intense, obsessive interests, about which a person constantly reads and becomes extremely knowledgeable. I keep hearing about kids with AS being referred to as "little professors", because they read heavily about their special interests and then give "lectures" to people while not noticing or paying attention to whether or not the people they are speaking to are showing signs of disinterest or boredom. If indeed I have AS, it seems to be a rather mild case and I have "outgrown" most of the more textbook symptoms I showed as a kid. But this is one particular characteristic that has always been remarkably clear in my life, and still very much is.

It's interesting that you mentioned making lists of things as being common autistic trait. I did this a LOT as a kid! Things like favorite elements, innovative ice cream flavors, organ stops (I had a long lasting fixation on pipe organs), languages I wished I spoke. Later in high school, I had lists of the girls I had crushed on or just thought were sexy as hell, and categorized them according to exactly how they appealed to me. Wow....

Roller coasters and floor plans. I can relate! I used to be obsessed with floor plans, especially for houses, when I was around 10 and I wanted to grow up to be an architect. I even had CAD software on the computer (before then I used Paintbrush, the Windows 3.1 version of MS Paint) and designed potential homes for the family. Coasters peaked around ten years ago, and it's been up and down from there, just like a real coaster, but I still love a good GCI woodie or B&M hyper. I used to frequent (and still occasionally post to) amusement park related forums and even today I take road trips with a friend or two just to visit amusement parks

chestnuts. and pregnant people. can't say why, just was.