What are your child's obsessions?
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What are your child's obsessions?
| Tue, 04-04-2006 - 10:27am |
Maybe you've done this before but I thought it would be interesting to talk about our kids obsessions.
My son loves animals. He knows so much about animals and dinosaurs, it's amazing. He loves Animal Planet and animal shows. Also, he loves his stuffed animals. He has quite a collection and always wants more. I buy cheap little stuffed animals and use them as rewards for him completing a workbook. It's about the only way I can get him to do one. He does have other interests as well, but animals take up most of his thinking. He even pretends to be an animal quite often. He will tell me, "Mom, I am a house cat named Snoopy who is black and white and he's yours."
Shelly


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LOL, Cait is animals. Always has been always will be. Her first word was "Doggie" and it was her only word for months. She is also an animal planet aholic. Since she was tiny you can always find either a small plastic or stuffed animal in her hands. Still do when home. If they would let her at school it would be there as well. The girl can tell you the most amazing facts about animals. She plans on being an Animal Cop when she grows up.
Mike's transforms but is always Legos or movies/video games. It is the characters from those. Mike will become the characters from whatever theme he is into. Currently it is Harry Potter. This is the longest obsession he has had for a while. When he was 3 he was Steve from Blue's Clues for a year. Since then he has ranged between bionicles, star wars, harry potter, Jak and Daxter, Danny Phantom, etc etc. The only toys he wants are either lego or video games. He really has little interest in anything else. Rarely he will get into his hotwheels if he is feeling scientific. Then he likes to put the tracks together over and over and figure out how he can make the cars go.
Renee
Alex has two obsessions - cars and maps. Cars have been his obsession since he was tiny. By the time he was 3, he could name the make and model of any car he saw on the road. He lives for the day each month that his Motor Trend magazine will arrive in the mail. Our basement wall is lined with his collection of model cars (and he probably has about 1000 Matchbox cars). When he was a toddler he never wanted to go to the children's section of the public library; he preferred to find the car books in the adult section (because they referred to specific makes and models of cars, not just vehicles with wheels!).
His interest in maps started when he was about 3 or 4. At that point he could name any country in the world and its capital. That has since evolved into a love of street maps, and he will spend hours drawing his own maps, either real or made-up. He has a huge collection of street atlases from all over the place.
Laurie
Laurie
Jake has been obsessed with Thomas the Tank engine sice he was about 20 months. He's starting to talk about them a lot less but now he has moved onto the solar system which he talks about non stop(LOL). He also has an obsession with spelling words right now which is okay with me so when someone asks him his name he says "I'm Jake" and right after goes on to spell it!
Teresa
Nathan's obsession right now is Star Wars. Anything that has to do with Star Wars...he loves. He still likes his Thomas trains...and the whole train table, etc. And he loves his monster trucks still too. He's been getting interested again in the Power Rangers. They have newer shows on tv and a whole new line of toys too!! YEAH!!!
michelle
Kyle is really into military history. He loves computer games that are war based. Loves the history chanel. Everything he brings home from art class is tanks or a battle scene.
Samantha
Stephanie's are kind of different. Your kids' obsessions seem so intellectual.
But Stephanie is obsesssed with colors. When I tell her to write a sentence for school using her spelling words, she writes in all the colors of the rainbow for every sentence. Like, "She wore a red, pink, aqua, blue, purple, black and orange coat." When I read it, she says, "oh, I forgot yellow," and tries to squeak it in there LOL.
She has to have something in her hands at all times and take everything with her when we go away somewhere. She takes books, small toys, stuffed animals, whatever she can. She grabs a bunch of toys and takes it to the van. We get out of the van and she grabs only half of them and when we go out again, she takes more to the van. We have more toys in the van than in the apartment LOL. She also stuffs her coat and pants pocket with them when we go to the store or for a walk. She can't be without them. She isn't particular on a certain toy either. She loves them all. She seems to walk away from electronic type games and toys.
She gets interested in a show or song and plays it over and over again until the next obsession. Right now the TV show is "Dragon Tales."
But she doesn't seem to have an intense interest in anything intellectual.
She also is obsessed with a few car models that her father and I pointed out and doesn't care about the others: PT cruisers, Hummers, Corvettes, Jeeps and the new VW Bug.
Debbie
I wonder if she might have synesthesia (sp?). It is a wild thing where senses cross over each other so for instance they may "see" numbers or words as colors. Or smell a memory. Her interest in colors makes me wonder.
Cait does this. I just found out about a year ago. Colors are numbers, etc. It is just one of those cool different things about ASD that always amaze me thought synesthesia isn't ASD specific it is just one of those wild neuro things than can be slightly more common in ASD kids like savantism is more common in people with ASD but you don't have to have ASD to be a savant.
Renee
For David (8), it's mostly anything Lego-related. He likes to build and create, but he also likes the little mini-figure characters. Some of them are from pre-existing storylines, but he's got a few that he's made up, like "Skelly Tom" and "Sara Ton" the skeletons. He has also made up certain storylines and relationships between existing characters. We almost never watch TV, so most of the stories he makes up are loosely based on a book, or out of his own imagination. On the rare occasions that we watch a Bionicle movie or something, I regret it, because it kind of sucks the creativity out of him for a bit. He memorizes every line and every scene, and then won't stray from it for a while.
I'm glad it's Legos, and not something like toilet plungers or Ming Dynasty tapestries. Talking about Legos and Bionicles with other 8-year-old boys is just fine. Still, it's a bit much. It's REALLY hard to get us all out to do anything outside the house, or to get us all together for a family board game or something. If it isn't Lego, he wants nothing to do with it.
In addition to Lego stuff, he's interested in "mad science" and "space aliens". He was disappointed at school when they went to the newly created "science lab", because he was half-expecting bubbling beakers of colorful liquids, and jars full of eyeballs. Every Lego character has had his/her own personal Lego "mad science lab."
Despite his love of fantasy, he HATES the characters that you find all over everything that is sold to children, like Sponge Bob, Power Rangers, or other TV-based characters. Well, come to think of it, I suppose there isn't much "fantasy" in characters that are pre-designed for the sole purpose of making money. He has to use an adult sized toothbrush, because you can't buy a kid-sized one without Barbie or Power Rangers on it (or a few other characters.)
Evelyn
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Debbie,
Your daughters obsession with colors reminds me of a book I read recently, Eating an Artichoke. Have you read that? The boy with Aspergers was obsessed with colors. I thought it was an interesting book.
Shelly
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