Pretend play not possible for kids with asperger?

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I have always had a very vivid imagination and I spent a lot of time alone as a kid and I played pretend all the time. In fact I still do. I have not been officially diagnosed but I fit so well in this forum and I have been unofficially diagnosed by someone who works very closely everyday with the Autistic and Aspie kids in our school system and that person observed me closely for nearly 8 months. So I don't know that I need an official diagnosis and this forum is the first time in my life that I have been able to identify all kinds of things in my personality and have others understand exactly what I feel. So FWIW, I love to play pretend and I do it now almost as much as I did when I was a kid.

When I was younger I had no problems playing pretend.

The only type of "pretend play" I had was acting out scenes from books. Not making anything up myself.

I very much have impairments with imagination and creativity.

The problem is the opposite of this thread title.

Is OUTGROWING pretend play possible for an aspie?

Based on myself - I would say 'no'.

Am over fifty and still play with plastic army men!

Well not EXACTLY.

Toy battleships actually.

I use accuracy tables that I divised myself, and dice, and armour penetration forumulas, and other sophisticated stuff I didnt use when I was eight. But I still play with them.

I couldn't play social pretend play but by myself could I didn't really play with toys as much as I just liked having them lol. I did play with my barbies and action figures though. I did play pretend with my neighbor who was 2 years younger than me but I didn't find it as fun as she did but I did have fun jumping in the giant trampoline with her. When I was little and my friends would play harry potter pretend I was allowed to join but it was uncomfortable and awkward to me so I just watched. It's always been that way.

I had no problem playing pretend as a child, heck I still do it now. EVery night I make up an adventure story to tell my son, My wife has stated numerous times I should record my "imagination" and development them into books, however that would require me having any sort of follow through which I don't have.

Now someone else trying to come into my pretend world/imagination, and trying to add to it, that's completely impossible. They are crossing in my personal space, like an uninvited guest walking into your home.

I played pretend. I just did so differently than other children. My mother had to "teach" me to make up stories for my dolls to act out, but I could do it. Otherwise, I preferred to arrange my toys in various tableaux or imagine conversations between various household items or other inanimate objects I watched and "liked." For example, in my mind the toaster and the microwave had rich inner life and chatted with one another regularly. I would say that is imaginative and/or pretending.

I've seen the contradiction of "People with ASDs cannot pretend play" and "People with ASDs love science fiction" within the same paragraph, so I don't put much stock in the idea that ASDs have anything to do with being able to use one's imagination -- I think that is just a personal thing, whereas in general some people like nonfiction and some like fiction. I mean, fiction is pretend -- and especially with sci-fi, you have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy it, which is the same thing as pretending -- "I'm suspending my disbelief and being a tiger today at recess!" is not far off from "I'm suspending my disbelief and watching Doctor Who travel through space and time!"

That's how it was for me, too, until I moved to a new school where all the kids wanted to do was play jump rope and tag and swing on the swings. Then, I ended up being ridiculed for "talking to the wall," when I was really just playing pretend by myself since no one else would play with me. The communities were right next to each other, but the kids were so different... I still don't understand why.

I don't see that as a contridiction.

I don't think everyone has impairments with imagination. I think some people retreat into their head, and others have impairments with imagination.

But impairments with imagination and pretend play doesn't mean an inability to suspend disbelief necessarily.

I'm a big fan of fantasy and science fiction. I without question have impairments in pretend play, imagination, creativity, etc. It definitely seems to be attached to my particular autism.

When I'm reading, I'm reading a story - I'm being told what it is that's going on. When I'm expected to come up with something, I need to come up with it. That I can't do. Suspending disbelief is not at all the same thing as me being expected to come up with something.

How would a tiger act? I don't know. I can't pretend to be a tiger when I don't know how a tiger acts. What am I supposed to do? What happens? I don't know what to do.

It's active vs passive. I can suspend disbelief. I don't need it to be real. Stories are stories. But if I'm supposed to be a tiger, then I need to act like a tiger and I don't know how a tiger acts so I can't do it. But I can listen to someone saying "This is how a tiger acts".


Now - I certainly know quite a few people who don't have these impairments. They're not universal. But it comes down to how stuff affects us. For me, I'm actually the textbook alexithymia including the lack of imagination. It actually does feel like I have issues with pretend play that are associated with autism. For most of my students, they're generally at the other extreme.

But science fiction and pretend play are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

I watched a lot of Animal Planet... like, constantly... so that may explain why I knew what a tiger would do.

So, I guess I am taking it too literally or interpreting it a certain way, but I can't really think how someone *could* play pretend without first having some input about what they are pretending to be. For instance, I often pretended to be an orphaned boy -- because boys are what I understood best, having two brothers, and I was so often left home alone that I didn't seem to really have a home so much as a shelter, and this one Batman episode had these orphans living in sewers... I replayed that a lot, and I would pretend to be in sword fights with an imaginary opponent, but I'm certain I'd seen plenty of sword fights on TV, and so sometimes the orphan would be the one having a sword fight in order to protect... what?... the rats in the sewer?... a girl he liked?

Of course you can't pretend play as something or someone you have absolutely no knowledge of.

If I were studying implicit social cognition (which I am), I would split ASD subjects into two groups, those who pretend played when they were children (age five or so) and those who did not.

I think that lack of pretend play is verry merry berry important autistic trait that indicates lack of implicit social cognition, and people who lacked these as natural behaviors in childhood might not show same measured behaviors in implicit social cognition eggsperiments as people who had.

There was study that tried to contract autism diagnosis to seven questions, and multiple questions were about pretend play in childhood for correctly predicting diagnostic status of individuals in population.

I know I pretend played. Though I never really played with toys much (except when playing with my sisters) and I probably did not play a lot with other kids (though I sometimes would play with others, I would have rather played with myself). I would usually just walk around making up stories in my head. I think I am still pretty creative today.

That's very interesting. My son's diagnosis is atypical autism and he's completly non-verbal. He also lacks pretend play and is almost 6 yrs old.

However, he doesnt't seem to be that impaired in social cognition (he seems to have empathy and he shares food with people).

I suspect that if my son had the ability of pretend play his dx would be changed to developmental delay. What do you think?

Sounds like a parody of a Bergman movie.

Electrical appliances, with tortured inner lives like the characters in "Scenes From a Marriage".

About the funniest things Ive ever heard.

Infants with autism: An investigation of empathy, pretend play, joint attention, and imitation.
By Charman, Tony; Swettenham, John; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Cox, Antony; Baird, Gillian; Drew, Auriol
Developmental Psychology, Vol 33(5), Sep 1997, 781-789.
Abstract
Systematic studies of infants with autism have not been previously carried out. Taking advantage of a new prospective screening instrument for autism in infancy (S. Baron-Cohen et al., 1996), the present study found that, compared with developmentally delayed and normally developing children, 20-month-old children with autism were specifically impaired on some aspects of empathy, joint attention, and imitation. Infants with autism failed to use social gaze in the empathy and joint attention tasks. Both the infants with autism and the infants with developmental delay demonstrated functional play, but very few participants in either group produced spontaneous pretend play. In the developmental delay group, but not the autism group, pretend play was shown following prompting. The implications of these findings for developmental accounts of autism and for the early diagnosis of the disorder are discussed.

This is about lack of spontaneous and prompted pretend play in young autistic children, and studies (Google Scholar, not posted here) have linked lack of pretend play to lack of ToM and joint attention.