AS and pretend play.

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Man, boy games are so much more fun I'll take tag and playing with "swords" and "guns" and stuff over that any day.

This was very informative, thanks.




When I was asked to play along, they always wanted me to be the father. I once said that I would play along and then claimed I would go to work and went away. It was pretty funny. At least I never accepted to be the mother. I wouldn't have wanted to pretend that I was doing chores.

I used to pretend play when I was younger and played 'house' and 'nurses' with my cousin. However, I am 21 and still create imaginary characters/scenes and prefer that than socialising.

Does your ability to carry out pretend play with other children rule out a diagnosis of AS absolutely?

This game seems to be so terribly boooring

It's not an official criteria for diagnosis. It's just something that has become a stereotype that many very young children with an autistic spectrum disorder displayed.

I'd say that a person is unable to true pretended play (=a play that is based on cooperation and strictly creative, not script based), when the intuitive social understanding is there to some extent. For example, I have like zero. But there are lots of those with asperger's that I know that have a fairly good understanding of social interactions, lesser than that of an NT, but way better than me. And this is where it gets tricky. How much impairment can a person show in social skills? If there is a small basis of understanding social interactions, does it somehow impair the child despite this? And how severe does the child display rituals and does the language development match the criteria?

Well, males often get pulled in by female friends. I was. I can't remember what it was like either. And look at the old "dennis the menace" series. margarite(sp?) was always trying to pull him in. Anyway, boys tend to see it as boring. I don't know how girls really see it, but it seems THEY like it!

Bingo! I think you nailed it perfectly, there. I remember that. I'd play with my toys (Star Wars obsession, don't you know), and make up short scenarios to do with them. It also helped that most had moving parts that I could move around, see when they'd fall over, when they'd stand, operate a moving hand, leg, lift the lid off, put it back on (you get the idea). But just freeform interaction with other kids? I remember not being able to do that. And I kept my toys pristine, so when other children wanted to play with them, I remember my mum commenting that I'd visibly tense up every time another child picked up one of my toys, in case they did it wrong or damaged it (she thought that was funny: really, not so much). But freeform? Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Playing House? Was never interested, and I still remember a game of Cops and Robbers, IIRC the only one I ever tried to take part in, where I was just bewildered as to what the heck I was supposed to do! In primary school during recess, I'd just walk around, around, and around any fixed point, try to avoid the other kids and their imaginary play. Walking, walking, walking.

That's a really good question. I'm borderline Aspie, and my stepmother is an autism specialist, and from what I've picked up from a reasonably long phone conversation with her, she tends to view things, once she's established that a child is somewhere on the spectrum, in terms of how much help a diagnosis may or may not be. If the label will help, if the services will help, then that's the direction you push, if it seems like the child is doing OK on their own, then don't go that route and just keep an eye on them in case they run into difficulties later. That seems to me to be a very sensible attitude - healthcare should be about benefitting the patient, so how much the impairment matters and therefore how to go about diagnosis should be tailored to what you believe will help. To a degree, many of the clinical criteria are value judgements - what is "clinically significant?" It's obvious in some patients, but in the borderline cases, you just need to try to work out what will be best for the patient you're treating.

The children here call it 'mummy and daddy'... and there arent really any rules... it's basically children acting like parents to a another child who would scream 'waaaaa!'

My sister and I loved to pretend play when we were little. In fact, we didn’t stop until we were probably 13 or 14! But we always pretended to be characters from our favourite tv shows, and acted out our own stories as those characters. We never played “house”, or “school”, or anything like that. Whenever the kids in our neighbourhood wanted to play something like “house”, I never seemed to do it right – they’d always complain that I was “supposed to do this when they did that”, like there was some set of formal rules to “pretending”. I guess I just couldn’t get the social interaction right – even when trying to pretend. Plus I didn’t really get the point of playing a family – playing is supposed to be… well… playing… not duplicating ordinary, mundane life!

My sister and I also played with dolls and toys, but again, we always came up with cool stories for them to act out. We had Barbie careening across the backyard on the clothesline, or deep-sea cave-diving in the depths of our bathtub. Other girls always seemed to want to have play “fashion shows” and “getting Barbie ready for her big date”. Blech.

It seemed it was the OTHER kids who lacked imagination – not me!!

Theres the rub. Autistics are quite capable of imagination and pretend play. Its all the other buggers getting it wrong that spoils it. The number of fights I had because the kid "playing" luke skywalker "got together" with the girl playing leia. They CANT. Theyre related!! ! Hes her brother ffs!! ! Or the arguments I had with my mother about why all my toy soldiers had american accents.. she thought it was media influence.. I KNEW it was because I only had german and american soldiers, thus they got the accent they were meant to have. A lot of aspies especially are all about the accuracy, and having some dumbass start making He-Man fly when he plainly cant is very very irritating.

I never "played" anything ,but i did have dolls and dinosours. I mostly just made up stories with em or orgainzed them the way I wanted and lined stuff up in a particular order till it looked good enough to me. idk what you call that maybe "stiming". anybody could play whatever it shouldnt have to mean anything if you dont.

I had farm animals and dinosaurs though. I also loved going to the Science Museum. I think I went at least five times in m childhood. When I was 11, I started regularly going to the Royal Institute lectures, and I loved them too.

I liked playing pretend, but only by myself. Other people always messed it up when I tried to play with them.

I found it hard to play and share with others.

lol, when i was in first grade I used to chase the boys at recess. If I caught them i'd bring them to a tree and make them lick it. (I decided on licking the tree because I had no clue what to do once I caught them). I still remember Joe licking the tree - I wonder if does.

I have a lot of experience with little kids. I think the kids on the spectrum are so much more interesting to watch them play than the NT kids. Our worlds are all in our heads with concrete rules and ways to carry things out. It's not that we can't pretend play, it really is that other people muck it up. We really do like to have our own world order.
The other part of that is the scripted part. We are such great memorizers of human habit. We have to be. Wouldn't know how to behave for ourselves if we weren't excellent at mimicking what the other humans do.
I also find that these are the kids that are excellent at board games. The routine and the exactness of the rules is extremely attractive and comforting. The rules are the rules and they never change. How comforting is that? Interactions with other people muck up that comfort. They want to change the rules or fudge on them. We need the rules to be the same.
Probably what makes relationships with us so hard as well. That other person mucks up all the rules that we've learned. They have their own interpretation which usually has nothing to do with us. LOL.