Imaginative play and autism spectrum

[ClareG5]

DS is in a queue for ND assessment. I never noticed anything when he was a toddler but recently when we were being screened, I was asked if he engaged in imaginative play as a toddler. He did (we have a toy kitchen, he’d make things, bring them over and we’d pretend to eat). And loads of pretending to be a firefighter or dinosaur or whatever costume he had on at the time. Because of this, I did say that he engaged in imaginative play.

however I now have another child (2) and her imaginary play is on a different level, she runs a whole restaurant or shop and really goes full in for whatever she’s doing. I am now wondering if this is more normal, or whether what DS did also counts as imaginary play.

Bump?

Sounds like he did do imaginative play to me. Hopefully this bumps for you as I've no experience with ND

dont worry, you will be able to explain in more detail during the assessment

I have 2 ND kids and I am as well. My boy has an incredible imagination, he is AuDHD and dyslexic, my girl is very set in rules and facts, she is AuDHD. The challenge with diagnostics currently is they often look at individual condition whereas the overlap of ND conditions is where it becomes far more complex.

My son was diagnosed at 4 as he was pre-verbal. He is in a mainstream school with lots of support, ridiculously talkative now and with All the imagination to a point where we can't keep up

We are still fighting for the autism part of my daughter's diagnosis even though it is obvious to those around her and to the Ed psych she saw recently.

Have a look into spiky profiles, all of us are so different in presentation at times but medical
Models are still behind in diagnostics in a lot of ways.

Missed the bit at the end, with some childcare qualifications in my background as well, I would say that is imaginative play. Taking on characters, acting as a costume is all part and parcel of imaginative play. There will be differing criteria they use for diagnostics which they will explain, but my first post is just a thought on that for awareness.

My DD didn't do imaginative play at all and wanted me by her side for all play. My ds goes off for hours and you can hear him do voices of characters etc. they're both ND (ADHD and I do suspect autism) but I think their imaginative side is just different. DD likes to write stories, draw etc. But she will never pick up a dolly and make it talk.

DD had to engage in imaginary play as part of her assessment but she was very fact based with it and ‘say what you see’ and struggled to come up with scenarios for the toys.
Looking back on her younger years, she would think up games and role play with her siblings but it was always on her terms and if they didn’t stick to her script, she couldn’t cope with it well.

Lots of people think play is imaginative when it is actually functional. For example, if you give a child a doll and a bottle, they may 'feed the baby". But that is not giving the baby a name, chatting to it, creating a scenario, it's merely using the bottle for what it was intended. If he brought you a cup because you asked for a cup of tea, did he create a new world or respond to the resource and question?

I have a teen DC with autism. There certainly was imaginative play at the toddler/younger child stage but it may have been a "neurodiverse" kind of imaginative play. There were specfic scenarios to be acted out repetitively. The DC felt a need to be in control of all participants and didn't respond well to other participants (friends/cousins/grownups) having their own ideas for what to say or do that might change the scenario.
But every autism profile is different, there isn't a "correct" way to engage in imaginative play nor is there only one "neurodiverse" way to engage in imaginative play

This counts as imaginative play.

Some children are more imaginative than others.

Some children with autism are imaginative in their play or they seem to be but they are really playing scenarios that they have seen on tv or in books etc.

Some children with autism are imaginative but inflexible in their play- so they have a storyline going but if someone does something differently they get upset. They tend to direct the play telling people what to do in a very exact manner. They are not reciprocal with their ideas.

Some children with autism will line their toys up or organise their toys. They might set up a scene and then set it up again in a different way. They don't actually get to do the playing bit.

You should be reassured by your child engaging in imaginative play. Some children have lots of traits of autism but they can still play imaginatively and because of this they can also imagine other peoples minds and understand more around what other people are thinking and feeling. So imaginative play is key when assessing for asd.

Mine used his play kitchen and liked driving cars around the 'map' carpet, and was diagnosed autistic just before he turned 4.

I'm autistic and have ADHD, and would play with a toy post office/play kitchen as a child. I had a vivid imagination (was hyperlexic, loved reading books and would write my own stories), but I wasn't a fan of making my dolls talk, teddy tea parties, or anything like that.

There's a lot of nuance in the criteria, and in how people present. The spiky profile is a thing, too - some people can be exceptional in one area but have challenges in others. You'll be able to explain more though, and they'll know what they're looking for.

It could have been imaginative play or copied behaviour /role play.

My asd son could pretend to make a cake and bring it over because he knows what to do. He couldn't make up a story about a group of bakers running a kitchen

What I notice with my autistic kids was that a lot of what might appear to be imaginative play was actually scripted. So either they would serve the same food, in the same order every time, or they would recreate the game exactly as they played in in Bluey (or other cartoons).

I was the same with my oldest (ASD diagnosis). She seemed to be doing imaginative play as she would play with a dollhouse, feed a baby doll, make cups of tea with teaset etc.

however now compared with her younger sister the play seemed more like scripting. She was acting out what she knew the toys were for rather than really using her imagination and coming up with new ideas.

DD would do imaginative play however it was always a reenactment, so she would reproduce what she had seen on TV or in books or repeat a game we had already played. She would play with the kitchen with me but wouldn't initiate it. I don't remember her ever freestyling something entirely from her imagination.

This has tracked right up to her teen years, she is extremely gifted in all school subjects but any creative subjects like writing stories, producing art work on her own she hits a massive stumbling block. She is incredibly skilled at the technical aspects of things like art and can produce beautiful pieces if she has something to follow, she can look at it and recreate it perfectly, but if you ask her to draw something without a reference she gets completely stuck.

It does count as imaginative play, yes.

My autistic son did engage in a lot of imaginative play. It wasn't scripted but I did notice that it was rather anxious and intense. Whatever alternate identity he was adopting in play would be held on to by him very forcefully. He almost disappeared in his play personas for days at a time, and he was quite upset when other people's reaction to him disrupted his sense of 'being' his play persona.

None of this was pronounced enough to make me see it as a sign of fundamental difference (and he wasn't diagnosed until early adulthood), but I guess it was part of the constellation of his autism.

Do try to think of all this as fluidly as possible. I know that is hard when you are going through the drama of possible diagnosis. But none of this is black and white. The diagnostic criteria (and the whole concept of autism) can flatten our perception of our child's nuances. There will be many influences on the nature of his play. Even if he is autistic, the autism will be just one influence, and the manner in which it will contribute to his personhood will be indirect, varied and uniquely his.

In my son's case, I think his autism shaped his play rather indirectly. Autism generates a lot of anxiety, and I think that it was his anxiety that he was healing in the nature of his play. Children can be anxious for a lot of different reasons, so it would have been wrong to view the nature of his play as being part of a great divide between being autistic and not being autistic.

(I do worry about how preoccupied society has become with this 'great divide'. If your son is diagnosed, it will just be one aspect of him, just one framing of his challenges - to be held onto only to the extent that it proves helpful in accessing help for him.)

My son did loads of imaginative play and storytelling as a child. His imagination was enormous, lots of friends with young children themselves commented on it. It was varied and unpredictable.

He was diagnosed at 14yo with ASD.

My eldest is on the spectrum and her imaginary play is off the scale. She’s always having comments about her imagination even now in upper primary school.

Thay was the one reason they didn't send us for an assessment with my daughter. She ticked every box for autism for girls BUT she could write brilliant stories. Looking back now though (Shes an adult) I do wonder if her 'brilliant imagination' was more to do with the fact she was obsessive over certain genres of books and had picked it up that way and it was more of a learned behaviour.

I would have said yes about my autistic daughter, but having read all these comments, no.

She never did lining up or anything stereotypical but her imagination really does lack depth. She is much more likely to play a physical game like keepy uppy with someone than anything imaginative.

One of my DC is on the autistic spectrum and the diagnostician looked at a range of behaviours to come up with the diagnosis. He explained that autism is like a buffet where you get a selection of different items but it is still from the same buffet.

DC had a very spiky development, has trouble breaking tasks down into individual steps and planning the steps - executive processing disorder, didn't talk and was then hyper verbal, didn't have friends - until university where they met a large number of other autistic students, didn't read until age 7 and then started obsessively reading for hours a day with a focus on 1950's and 1960's science fiction and Kurt Vonnegut, found bright lights, loud noises, and cold temperatures overwhelming, couldn't eat quite a lot of foods due to taste or texture, had an upside down cicadian rhythm, find eye contact painful. They had no issues with imaginative play or imagination, but they are still autistic.

Yes, my autistic son won prizes for his stories and poems. They were genuinely creative and talented, but they were also an extremely proficient re-rendering of all the styles that he had absorbed from his very wide reading

Ds has ASD and he did play imaginary games.

I remember getting a call from school to say him and another friend (both aged 5yo) had been found missing after playtime. Turned out they'd hidden themselves in the trees at the bottom because "the school was being attacked" and they were the only line of defence in contact with the police while the school was held hostage.
He said in total bewilderment when I spoke to him about how worried the school was when they didn't come in. "But we told them. I spoke to <head> on my walkie talkie."
I asked him if this walkie talkie really existed and he said "Yes, it's a real imaginary walkie talkie...."

Another time he told me a plane had landed on the playing field and he'd piloted it back to the airport with his form as passengers...

He couldn't imagine ordinary things. Things like he bought his toy dog a real dog bowl because he couldn't just imagine a dog bowl. Or if I'd got out a dolls tea set he needed to have something on the plates - he wouldn't pretend to eat.

So he did do imaginary play. But it was on his terms. So he decided what was happening and got so far into it he was closed to anything else. His creative writing was not imaginary. It would be along the lines of: "He saw a mountain 100m high. He climbed it taking 3 hours and 43minutes and 24 seconds. He saw a bear, an eagle and a puma. He came down again and had tea which was baked beans on toast."

Whereas dd2 was much more inclined to arrange flowers in the garden into a fairy picnic and decide that a bee passing was a fairy postman or if you gave her a doll she'd feed it, and change the nappy etc.
Her writing was much more imaginative and long winded so her story above would be more along the lines of:
"The mountain stretched up into the sky with flowers that were red and pink and puple. The flours sang to each other and the bees hummed a tune as they collected the honey and put it into bags. He laughed when he saw the bear because it had a green apron on and was eating honey sandwiches and the eagle came down to join it with huge wings that were bigger than the bear and the eagle didn't like honeysandwiches so the fairys fetched some flors which theymad into cupcakes wwhich were all the coloursofthe rainbows. A rainbow came out of them and he climmed up the steps on one side and slid down the slide of rainbowclours the colours stuckto him and he sparkled like the fairiesin alll the colours"
With the spelling and punctuation getting worse, and words run together as she got into the story.