How did you play as a child?

Post Reply New Topic

Hello, my son who is very young(4.5) with AS has very little interest in play (independently and with other children).
I understand the not wanting to play with other kids, but he doesn't seem to have a desire for it on his own either. He is not into building things, he doesn't play with legos or action figures. He will roll his toy cars around, but that is as far as it goes. I think that is because his special interest is in makes and models of cars. He also does not play outside much either.

Anyway, I really love my little boy, but it makes me sad that he doesn't play very much. I was wondering if any older individuals with AS remember how they played as a child. Thanks so much!

I usually had an interest in a particular movie or tv show, so i would be the main character. At one point it was Robin Hood(the animated disney version), at another it was the Wizard of Oz, and another time was Rainbow Brite.

I never did know how to play. I remember watching my siblings playing and just standing, staring not knowing what to think. At school it was the same and I remember wondering why I didn't know how to play like the other children. I knew how to learn, copy what I saw and heard and keep things organized. I could follow the instructions on a box and bake a cake when I was eight. My mother got me to do it saying I knew how to do it better than she did. I quickly lost interest in that sort of thing after that as I knew I was being used. I liked to draw constantly when I could find paper but I didn't have any understanding or concept about pretend play, though I didn't know that was what it was at the time. My mind was/is very literal.

i never played with other children because they messed up my games.
they were never interested anyway much in playing with me because my play style bored them.

how high functioning is your child?
even though i was cut off from other people's company, i still had an interest to recreate the external world in a small scale with my toys. i had many matchbox cars and trucks and "earth moving" toys, and small metal replicas of jetliners.

when i played with a matchbox car, i would try to scale the movement of my toy car to what i knew it would look like if it was full size.
so i accelerated them with a scaled perspective which looked very slow and idiotic to average kids.
they would accelerate their cars by swinging their arms (60 g's?) and running off with their car flying in the air.
my cars always lost every race because i did not accelerate them without reference to scaled down reality like the other kids did.

parents of the normal kids always were sorry for me, and the normal kids called me a "mental case".

i did not care. i hope your child becomes interested in something. that is all that is needed in my opinion.
sorry i can not give any advice, i just posted in response to "how did i play"

When I was young I would build things with Lincoln Logs. I would also draw very much. I drew on the back of my school work when I had completed the work.

When I got older I would be interested in one particular television show, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When I got action figures I would stand them up in two lines facing each other and just look at them. I didn't move them as if they were fighting, although I remember being aware of other people moving action figures like that. I thought that doing so was dumb because in a realistic environment there wouldn't be giants moving all of the characters around when the characters were interacting.

I also liked building LEGO spaceship kits. I liked the symmetrical ones very much.

I played just like any other kid. I enjoyed playing with cars, instead of the usual dolls that girls like to play with.

I guess I could say I never really played. Mostly I would do things like get my dolls out, organize them someway, and just look at them. Sometimes I did something we called 'crashpot' with my brother, where we would a lot of his matchbox cars just in one heap, we'd choose some, I'd always organize mine in order of size, from the smallest to the largest, and using these we would try to turn the other cars upright. The one who managed to get all of them up won.

Maybe there is something scensory there that is more interesting than talking? It's routine to, isn't it. Now since you asked.

I rarely played with kids other than my younger sister. I understood my sister better than them, so I of course interacted with her many times. At school I started out copying other children, and not communicating with them as a way of play interaction. They avoided me, and played elsewhere.

I simply didn't get what I was doing wrong, and didn't care either. Stareing and day dreaming at stuff during my childhood was clearly more interesting then a strange ball or some handle bars. Oh well.

how deep does his interest in cars go? knowing that would help interaction, i think. he could watch races on tv, build models of different types... i'm partial to rallying. snow and ice are my favorite riding surfaces. it makes delivering pizzas more interesting.

my fiancee loves cars -- he's obsessed with them. he is on a car forum. well, there's so much to do with cars!

Alone, with toys I collected viciously.

when i was younger i liked to play with my doll house preferably by myself. i had plots of love and angst that i created that i didn't enjoy people messing with. when i was like 8 i played with my ty beanie babies and had background stories running for each beanie. i would normally have a developed plot going on and still hated people barging in on my stories.
i remember i went over to a friend's house once and i refused play with her beanie babies unless she left the room.

i think i was ok playing with others if it didn't involve toys.

edit: *pulls beanie babies out of closet*

I usually would play on my own when I was a child without anybody interrupting my game and it would really wound me up if it did... I was personally really odd type when I was a toddler.

I did however play with other people when I was older playing with action man toys and barbie dolls yet I couldn't really tell the difference, it seemed fairly the same to me at the time

Then from when I was 10, my play level was just as normal as any other normal kid would be and I would be like the chatterbox of the group of friends half the time...

I think you kinda figured by the amount of posts I have

AngelBear, when I was young I also played with cars and I had a gas station with a parking lot. So I drove my miniature cars to the gas station had them washed, refueled, drove them to the second floor and had them parked. I would recomend that you try to play with your child and try motivating him to play if he feels confortable. Maybe drawing roads on big sheet of paper so he can drive his cars... When he is playing with the cars try introducing new toys little by little, teaching how to play with them.... Building around his interests in cars is also good, having his cars parked in a garage, putting action figures in cars and driving them etc...
Maybe he won't play spontaneously but if you teach him/help him he will do it....
(that is what I read on Playing, Laughing and Learning with Children on the Autism Spectrum...)

I think your kid's special interest is probably how he plays. I did some of what they call "social imitative play" as a kid, for example I remember ironing handkerchiefs as a youngster, imitating Mom; but I also did a lot of scripted, somewhat repetitive things, such as giving all my dolls appendectomies (yes, really)... because I was fascinated with medicine at the time. I had this book about going to the hospital, I think. That was long ago.

Playing is different for autistics, though. A lot of us play by collecting information about what we're interested in; or reproducing sensations that feel nice to us; or repeating a familiar book or movie. A lot of the time you will see typical-style play start to emerge later than it does in most kids; with parallel play (you know, playing side by side with other kids, rather than interactively playing) at first, and then maybe they'll start figuring out the interactive stuff, though that has lots of social pitfalls (many times you end up being too bossy or not knowing how to join in, that kind of thing...)

You can expect him to play differently, though, because he learns differently. Playing is how kids learn, after all. His special interests are a great window to interaction; don't squelch them!

One thing I went through was being told I needed to have more fun, and I didn't understand why because I thought I was having enough fun. Apparently not, since according to my parents, what I did wasn't fun and I had to do other things that were fun. This makes no sense to me even now because I always knew I was having fun and was happy when I was left alone, but that wasn't good enough for them. If I had been just let be, I'd have been fine.

However, they tried forcing other things on me I wasn't interested in so I could, at least in their eyes, start having fun, or so they said. I of course ended up miserable because I just wanted to do my own thing. I know now more than ever that it wasn't my fault I didn't like the same things others did.

I guess they thought forcing me to do other things and even denying me what I liked for these other things would make me start liking them, which in turn would make me normal. It never worked and has only bred resentment in me towards my family.

Sometimes it's best to just let the kid be.

When I was a child, I tried doing imaginative play with my brother at home and some friends at school - but I'd always get frustrated and either start an argument or leave, because they didn't play the way I thought they should. I much preferred to play by myself, where everything went the way I thought it ought to.

As an adult, I find it very difficult to interact with my nieces and nephews, because I don't know how to play with them. I usually just passively go along with whatever they want to do, following their examples. Sadly, they still don't really seem to like me much...