Friend Fixation

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My daughter, Katie, is an almost-seven year old aspie, with a really supportive classroom teacher and, from what I can see on my visits to her class, mostly kind, compassionate classmates. One thing her teacher has spoken with me about is her tendency to fixate on one classmate in particular, to the exclusion of others. She will insist on sitting by that child, will trail around behind that child on the playground, and will engage that child in conversation constantly, to the point where the child feels uncomfortable and even says things like, "I don't want you to sit by me" or "Go play with someone else, please." This often continues for weeks before Katie's interest transfers to another child and starts all over again.

We've tried talking to Katie about spreading her friendships out, giving people space, honoring their requests to be left alone, etc. with a little success, but she seems not to understand why this behavior is troubling to her NT friends.

My question is: is this normal aspie behavior for a six year old? And what other things could we do to encourage her to be more moderate in her interactions with other children?

I can answer this from my viewpoint from when I was a little girl.
When I had a friend, I didn't think they needed other friends, in fact I really got upset if they had another friend. Since I preferred to only have one friend at a time, they should feel the same way as well. I believe, that Ms. Willey experienced similar things. Maybe reading "Pretending to be Normal" might help you see things from your daughters perspective.
Sometimes embracing her "quirks" and maybe guiding her by use of a social story on how to nicely say she doesn't prefer to play with them would help.

Oh wow. Flashbacks to my past. I remember at that age throwing a huge tantrum in class because I couldn't sit next to the girl I liked. Eventually the teachers gave up and put me next to her. Heh. Damn, that's embarrasing.

Now that I think about it - I've had these fixations all my life. Nothing sexual or predatory, just being genuinely interested in another person to an almost obsessive degree. I just tend to ignore these infatuations now.

Sounds like normal aspie behaviour to me too.

I used to have one friend too when I was a kid. But I never bothered or irritated them if they did not want me to be around. Actually it often happened that I went to such a friend every single day for years, until I suddenly found another friend and then I would just simply swap friends, whithout even any notification or anything to the "old" friend. I realize now I must really have hurt some of these friends at the time by doing that.

Yep, that sounds like me too. Even now at age 29 I still subconsciously feel that I only need one friend. I do have more than one but I don't socialize much with the extra ones. My husband doesn't understand it - he reminds me that when I was younger I had female friends that I socialized with a lot - why don't I do the same thing now? I tell him that I only ever had one friend at a time, and at this point in my life *he's* that friend so that's why I'm not that interested in hanging out with other girls like I used to. I also tend to have the feeling, like someone else mentioned, that my friends also need only one friend and my automatic reaction is to get jealous if they have other friends besides me. Of course I can reason with myself about it now and handle it in a more mature way but that hardwired reaction is still in there.

I was never really like that when it came to friends. I didn't mind my friends having a few other friends. On the other hand, I rarely had many friends anyway and in some cases, had no friends at all. It was always hard for me to make friends to begin with, so I was happy, even if I had to share them with others.

The one friend issue I did have involved my sister. If I'd have friends in the house, she'd try to make friends with my friends and then lure them to become her friends. Although they'd still be my friends, I felt I was pushed me into the background and she had taken over. That really used to hurt me alot as she would find topics to talk about with my friends, like books I hadn't read, movies I hadn't seen, or how bad my musical tastes were and how superior her's were and how they should listen to her music not mine.

It made no sense to me because she had plenty of friends and never had trouble making friends, while it was always hard for me. Why couldn't she have her friends and I have mine? What hurt even more was how if she ever had friends in the house, I was in no way allowed to disturb them and if I did, I would get screamed at or threatened. I thought that rule would apply to her too when I had my friends over, but it didn't. Even though our parents did try to do something about that occasionally, her defense(and it usually stuck) was that she wasn't bothering us or causing trouble, she was just trying to be nice.

The only thing that kept this from happening were if she wasn't home when friends came by, or if I didn't allow friends over, and in some periods of my life, had no friends at all.

ok, so you've got me thinking about myself~ i'm an NT though your post has me thinking twice about that~ i still to this day have difficulty having any sort of meaningful friendship with more than one person...i have lost touch with old friends because i simply didn't want to call them and make the effort. as a child, i didn't have many friends. those that i did have, i remember being jealous if they wanted to play with someone else instead of me.

I tend to become intensely attached to my friends and sometimes jealous over them. I think this is fairly common among aspies.

This reminds me of something that happened a long time ago with NT kids (or, so I assumed - this was over 20 years ago). At the age of 6 or so my son came home totally dejected. His best buddy in the neighborhood had sent him home because another boy came to play.

The boy's mom came down the street to get my son and help her child learn how to play with more than one at a time.

In NTs, this is the age when they are learning and IMO and from my experience, if they can grow out of this one-at-a-time thing then they're okay. When it continues, then it's a warning flag. I've seen a lot of 1st grade kids struggling to figure out how to handle the whole threes-a-crowd thing. By third grade, they should not be having trouble. Taking it to obsession would be a red flag, but that's part of the whole puzzle for me - what's *normal* and what's a little too much? My youngest son is ASD and I can see it in him, but to list out traits is not as easy. My oldest son had some troubles, but not like this - that's the best I can do right now.

Thank you all for your thoughts and input! I'm very glad to have found this supportive community.

I sometimes find that my "special interest" becomes a person. It's horrible really, I hate it. I wish I could just be interested in objects, not people.