To be worried about my 3 year old?

[MsFrog]

My 3 year old DS is obsessed with numbers. Obsessed. He talks about them constantly, and has done for over a year. Everything else we do ends up about numbers, e.g. playdoh, swinging at the park. In the car he just reels off numbers for looooooong chunks of time. Odd number, even numbers, all the times tables, up in 5s or 10s or 3s or 50s. He runs around shouting numbers when he's playing. At the water park he didn't splash in the water, he just bent down and traced sums in the puddles. He can do addition and subtraction.

It is endless and it's driving DH and me absolutely up the wall. I'm starting to feel like it's just not normal (I know that's not the best word to use). He's an anxious little boy as well, but not overly so.

Anyone have any experience of anything like this?

My son was obsessive over particular things at this age, it was the only sign really then that he had aspergers. It wasn't diagnosed until just before secondary school. He was also quite anxious. Might be nothing, just worth baring in mind in the future.
Having obsessions and talking at people are typical with aspergers as is being anxious.

Is he not just memorising and repeating the videos he's watching?

What a cool kid. My children were into their numbers in a big way when they were small too. I extended it and taught them the idea of negatives (going the other way in the number line) and also square roots. When they understood those concepts I introduced the idea of imaginary numbers (square root of minus one). They loved the idea of a number being imaginary and also that they understood something that they wouldn't normally have met until A level Maths. So much fun to be had with numbers!
(We're all autistic in our family btw. 🙂)

Some people just like numbers and the beautiful patterns in them. I work with maths and I'm not autistic.
He'd probably like a bit of geometry or some counting blocks. Possibly a KS1 gold star maths workbook. Model making too. Lego, meccano.

I'm sure there is an episode where they sing 250, 200 150 etc so that may not be that unusual.

Yes ds 3 was the same, he was diagnsed at 3 and a half with autism and learning difficulties. He has no learning difficulties and is still a whizz with numbers. His favourite game at six was beat the calculator. Ds 2 was also mad about numbers, no autism nut profoundly gifted and an eidetic memory. I'd say the difference between them was for ds 3 the interest was all encompassing so didn't have the imagination eo play anything outside numbers but for ds 2 he liked numbers but he also liked cars and trains and books and lego etc etc. You should ask GP for a referral to a developmental paeditrician.

Thanks for all the responses, it's really interesting to hear all the different perspectives. I think I just wanted to see if people said "oh yeah, they are all like this about something" or "wow that's very unusual!"

I work with adults with learning disabilities and ASD, but I'm not familiar with how it can present in children. I'd be very surprised of he was autistic, given his ability at imaginative play, but like I say, I don't know.I suppose really it doesn't matter what the cause is, it'll all come out in the wash! I just need to develop a thicker skin for listening to it!!

Thanks for the encouraging and kind responses about him 😊

My 5 year old is like this and has been since about 3. He was a late talker but could count to 100 before saying basic words. His favourite thing to play with was always a measuring tape.

We recently sent him to Kumon as we thought he would enjoy it and meet other children who are into maths but he finds it boring and doesn't like to write the numbers down. It was supposed to be an outlet for him not because we want him to be one of those Further Maths 'A' level at 11 kids!

It's non-stop from the minute he wakes up and to be honest very boring and annoying. I am not good at maths and I am constantly being quizzed on how many seconds until his birthday which is 128 days away and his birthday after that and how many minutes until he's 8 and how many leap years there will be and what 163 x 163 is etc. Other kids at school don't really want to play with him as he wants to talk about numbers all the time. His reception teacher thought he was on the autistic spectrum but others don't agree. School will do their referrals but we're not pushing it and if he is then he is and we will make sure he gets extra help.

Everybody's stories are encouraging and maybe we should have a big meet up and let them have multiplication chat and talk about Fahrenheit conversions and distances to the moon and back but but but what if you went to the moon AND THEN Mars and how many 38s are in a million....I'm only half joking - I'd actually love him to meet kids like him.