Do other AS kids do this?

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My daughter likes to have a lot of little toys that she carries around with her. I hesitate to really call them toys. They are really "things" I try to keep it to toys or parts of toys, but it could be bottle caps or coins if she can find them, rocks, straws, things she finds. She hoards them on her person and usually has a couple in her hands. She would get upset if she dropped one or no longer had a certain number of them (the number changes) so I bought her a purse to store them in. She hoards these items in her bed too. Sometimes she puts them in her mouth so I clear her bed at night when she goes to sleep because I worry about her falling asleep with an item in ehr mouth and choking on it. When she is "using" these items she mainly touches them from best I can tell. Sometimes they talk with squeaky voices. She has toys, but generally doesn't play with them except for electronics, blocks, legos, play dough, and art stuff.

Anyone else see this behavior?

Sure, kids on the spectrum often form attachments to unusual objects.

My son is almost always carrying around something...sometimes a ruler, for example. He pretends the objects are numbers (his fascination) or sometimes a telephone.

My youngest, used to have to carry round little magazine cutouts of her favourite characters everywhere. I used to have to sellotape them as they would fall apart from being carried so much, she would have been about 3 or 4 when she did this.

At the moment, she is carrying round a bowl. The history to that is, that over a month ago she had a sickness and diarrhoea bug for a day and a half. She was so phobic about being sick again that she started carrying round this little bowl she has (it's a toy washing up bowl) as a 'sick bowl' just in case. Since then she hasn't stopping carrying it no matter what I say. It goes to the dining table with her, it goes from room to room with her and it goes on her bed at night.

My dds attachments to these objects seems to be very strong but temporary. While she has it it's like "wmg, it's my straw! No one will touch my straw! This is my buddy!" but then she'll find something new and she'll discard an item. I can convince her to "TRade" too. Usually an item will only last a day or two and then it will get replaced with something else or rotated out. I'm not sure what criteria or rules she uses for her system...

Yeah pretty much sounds like my kid.

Yes. My son has random collections of random odd things. It would be unusual (almost alarming) to have him come in the house from outside without a "found treasure" in his pocket. In fact, 90% of the time when I am doing laundry, there are "things" in his pockets. All kinds of weird things. Most often rocks. He has rocks stored in various parts of his room. Arranged in patterns. Sometimes grouped. And his bed is...well...it just has stuff in it. Lots of it. We joke about it all the time.

My son doesn't even carry an official diagnosis of AS. He is ADHD and NVLD, which his neuro considers to be on the spectrum but on the other side of AS (AS between NVLD and classic autism), so I think this can happen at almost any point in the spectrum. I should also note that my son is a bit older (almost 11).

I used to call my son the 'treasure hunter" because no matter where we went, he would find something and pick it up and carry it around for a while. He mostly keeps his treasures in his special treasure boxes at home now and doesn't need to carry them around - DS11

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Yup, my son does the same. I always thought it was interesting, I guess I'm not surprised to see others here with the same thing. He always carried something in his hand, always hand something small, or a few things, little toys, buttons, a quarter, rock, candy... I haven't seen him do it as much lately though. I alway thought it was his version of a baby blanket.

My 4 yr old likes bits of thread and ribbon and will store them up. They are really important to him. He also has a stack of rainbow drinking cups that go with him most places to be held, stacked, lined up, ordered. I remember my 13 yr old used to like old juice bottles when he was a toddler, one day I filled one with glitter and water. It was like I had given him the best present in the world, he carried it around for days Simple pleasures.

Not a parent, but I remember my childhood very vividly. When I was a little, I developed attachment to "little things", like rubber bands, wrappers, rocks, bottle caps, etc. After a while, I caught wind that my parents were very much against it, since they've thrown out my collections multiple times when I wasn't home. Since they made it very clear that they were in charge (use your imagination on how they did that), I was afraid to speak out against it. So I'd let my attachment play out in secret: I'd hide the "little things" in my dresser, all the way in the back of the drawer, and play with the objects in secret.

As I got older, keeping a private collection became increasingly difficult, because my parents started to get on my case more and more about how I was "bringing trash home". I rechanneled my desire to keep a collection to baseball cards. My parents were tolerant enough of that to leave my collection alone, and even occasionally gave me money to buy the cards that I said were "really nice" (that meant had a design I liked). Now, I couldn't care less for the players on the cards; I barely recognized their names and faces. What I really liked was looking at the designs and the sense of owning a collection.

I carried around a box of minature star wars toys.

I outgrew it.

That's awful. I let her have her things, I only take stuff if it's something gross or that she might choke on. Otherwise, she can have it. Hence why I got her a purse for the stuff. She was always dropping things or leaving them in her pockets.

I have to thin my son's collections, otherwise his room would look like an episode of hoarders. That probably isn't really even a joke. He now separates out the really important stuff from the "stuff" and as long as I do it when he is not around so he doesn't have to watch it and as long as I leave the "important" stuff alone (I have given him two small boxes he can use), he is fine. Sometimes you can't allow the little collections to continue to build because they begin to become big collections.

Just wanted to give perspective. I know from making mistakes in the past when I assumed my children's rather "mild" behaviors were the equivalent of more intense ones, thinking another parent's choices are "awful" is not always fair. What may look--on the surface--to be similar behavior may be drastically different in terms of magnitude. If my son only had a few dozen rocks in his room, I'd be happy to leave it alone. At this point, though, I would imagine he would have hundreds or maybe eve thousands if I didn't return some of them to the "wild." When you add in the juice box straws, random bits of broken plastic, gum wrappers, and other things that he picks up, things could get out of hand very easily.

Fair enough, I'll choose my words more carefully next time. However when I said "awful" I was mainly referring to the part about :



My imagination on that went in a distinctly bad direction.

My little girl likes to collect things and also puts things in her mouth. She picks up sticks, stones, flowers, feathers etc and gets quite possessive about them if I say she cant bring them in the house (sometimes they are huge dirty sticks or rocks!). She eventually settles at leaving them in the garden in a safe place but never forgets what she has stored there!
She also likes to grab a toy before she leaves the house and carry it round like its her favourite toy. But unlike NT kids its just whatever toy or thing was to hand when we left, she actually doesnt care what it is.
I find things in her pockets and school bag that she has picked up inthe playground, snail shells etc. She also takes things like bits of paper and glue sticks from school!