DD (3.5)'s extreme and constant role-playing is a bit freaky. Is this normal???

[nezelette]

My 3.5 yr old DD is constantly pretending to be someone else, usually a character from one of the musicals she is OBSESSED with (Sound of Music, Annie, Oliver).
This has really intensified in the last week or so, to the extent that she is never really "herself" anymore. She wakes up and the first thing she says is "I'm Oliver Twist". She kept Oliver Twist going for four entire days. Impossible to distract her from it. We had half an hour of tears because she "wanted to be a boy for real". She corrects us all day long when we say "she" or call her by her real name.
This is exhausting and really quite worrying now. Is she unhappy being herself? Do we need to indulge her or ignore her? We've explained that we like her better when she's herself but we also role-play with her several hours a day.
What to do now??????
HELP!

LOL love2sleep - you have to admire him don't you

I would admire him if I wasn't too busy bashing my head against a brick wall

dd is really into role play she is nearly 6 and has liked it for last 3 years, she is more into boy stuff pirates ect she often says she wants to be a boy and when she makes a wish for thowing a penny ect she always wishes to be a boy!!
Admit it is annoying, the repetitiveness of it all

Hmm, well I have found out more about DS's alter ego Naya. Nayah is a mallard and he is 38 and he has a friend called Carrie who is a girl who lives at London Waterloo... I quite like the surreal aspects of it.

ELR, at the risk of being very nosy and interfering, are there people in your family who are very sexist keen to make your DD 'feminine' ie stop her doing things she enjoys and tell her that enjoyable things are only for little boys? Or are there people around her who make it obvious that boys matter to them more than girls?

Worry not. DS2, who is the only "neurotypical" (ie normal) one of my DSs, did this constantly. If he wasn't being Pippin the dog from Come Outside, he was telling me about his imaginary husband (a dragon called Blur, or Blair, or Bleurgh - we never could tell) and his 22 or so imaginary children (he gave birth to another one quite frequently).

He is now nearly 7 and would be furiously embarrassed if he knew I was posting this on the WorldWideWeb .

When I went to visit a friend a while back her Disney obsessed 3 year old refused to answer to her name and we all had to call her Beast!

Thank you so much everyone, I'm so relieved and do feel a bit silly now that I was worried!
Turniphead1 thanks for uinderstanding my weariness and worry!
Now that she's not Oliver Twist anymore I have to admit Oliver had his good sides: he was blooming grateful to have a home and family after all that hard life in the streets, and he was always hungry, eating everything, even what DD usually hates!!!

madamez I was wondering about that but girls are very much valued in our family... Maybe grandma is too keen for her to be feminine as she only had sons and was desperate to have a girl to play with.

Other interesting fact is that a number of women around us are gay and slightly butch, this includes members of the extended family and a couple of my good friends. Maybe she finds them cool?? They're not really boys though...
She even said she wanted to go to hospital to get a willy stuck on (WHERE does that come from???). That was yesterday. Today she woke up wanting a barbie and nail varnish

This thread has made me lol. My dd is only just 2 but already has an imaginary hedgehog friend who dances with her and eats her food. Am looking forward to the role playing now.

DD1 went through months of being various engines (quite often Boco) It was so tedious. She'd get really cross and yell 'mummy, I am CRANKY THE CRANE, will you please remember my NAME'. It would go on and on and on. I was so relieved when we moved out of that phase.

Normal

Before dd could talk properly she decided she was a bear. She kept saying 'bear' and I didn't know what she meant. I wondered why she seemed to have forgotten to use a spoon and was sticking her fingers in her fromage frais and licking them. Turned out she was Winnie the Pooh. If I said 'good girl' she'd say 'bear'.

At three and a half she was always someone else and kept assigning different roles to me and to all her toys. They changed with bewildering frequency and I used to suffer from acute role confusion, whereas she always seemed to be able to keep track of what was going on. Quite often she was me and I had to be her, which was entertaining (I used to play her up and get a bit of my own back, then I'd hear her using my own techniques on me).

When she started school she was a little kitten for weeks. I thought it was quite a good way of dealing with the stress, it allowed her to be babyish and get me to feed her from a bowl etc.

madamez not at all, dont live near to family so not many doting frilly dress buying grandparents around!!
Dh always done lots of role play with her since she was tiny so more boy type stuff i suppose batman spiderman ect and she loves dr who, she wheres only pink and her hair is so long she can sit on it but she is not a girly girl at all

oh my dd1 is doing this just now! all the time, in fact she is adamant that 'i am not dd1 i am a duck/child minder/baby jaguar/trampoline/dance girl/show girl /beautiful girl who takes your order for coffee at the garden centre' and that's all been today!

i've not been allowed to be mum today - at one point she told me that i was the 'silly woman in that car that just pulled out in front of us'.

When I was this age, I insisted that I was a boy called Montgomery, I distinctly remember even insisting that my nursery nurses called me it. I'm now reasonably normal

Thank goodness its normal.

DS2 role plays all the time. He pretended he lived on a farm for weeks and was so convincing that half the staff at his pre-school really did believe he lived on the farm and apparently, so did most of the children.

We went to the induction parents evening at DS2's new school last week and the parents of one of the boys from his pre-school were there and heard me tell the teacher that our house was the one she could see from the class room. The mother was really shocked as she was sure we lived on a farm too.

I was worried that he was either going to be a world famous novelist or else end up in prison on some deceit charge but I feel much better now!

wow, this thread is so reassurring...

my dd2 3.6 has created a whole new family for herself. She always talks about her brother (she only has a sister) and her,
'other mummy!' - sob!
'other nanny who lives in Southend' - real nanny lives in London and she's only been to Southend once!

On and on it goes. She talks to them every day, describes them in vivid detail and refers to them constantly.

I was starting to find it slightly worrying..

Funny aren't they!

DD (4) hasn't been herself since for the last year. At the minute shes obsessed with Kung Foo Panda - and insists shes the panda, Daddy'd the mantis, I'm the dragon (!!??) and her grans Dog is the wee one who teaches them. She hasn't even seen the blessed film yet so goodness knows how bad she'll be after it.

In her nursery school report it said "... fondness for role play should be encouraged.." - My ass it should! When I pick her up from Grans she can be a princess (i.e. a generic princess), ariel, cinderella, aurora, a kitten, a cat, a dog, a tiger, Sher Khan (sp?), any one of her friends, the mummy, the big sister, but never never my wee girl. I sympathise.

my DS roleplays ALL the time.

start worrying when you start instigating the role playing yourself.

i caught myself yesterday saying to DS... "i know.. i'm sportacus and i'm coming to rescue you!!!!!!!!".

ahem...[dons dark glasses and rocks in corner]

It's totally normal.

I took my DS (3 at the time) to a soft play area when my DD was about 6 weeks old. A lady came over and said
"Is anyone Buzz's mum?"
"No" I said
then quickly said yes as I realised DS had decided to be Buzz Lightyear that day Poor woman must have thought new baby hormones had affected my brain

my 3.5 year old has variously been a puppy dog, a pig and her friend ROsie recently. All normal