Did you eat things you shouldn't as a child?

[ofwarren]

I don't do these things now, but as a child I used to suck coal. My dad was a coal miner and we had a shed full of the stuff. I also used to suck wet sponges and flannels.

My eldest brother who is also autistic but needs full time care used to eat poo if you didnt catch him in time. This happened till he was toilet trained at about 9.

My eldest son who has an aspergers diagnosis still chews things he shouldn't and he's 19. He chews mainly plastic and thin bits of metal, so bottle tops, coat hangers, whole pens etc. His room is littered with plastic fragments.
As a young child he would chews through the cuffs of his clothes.

I have quite bad TMJ disorder as I bite down so much. I'm wondering if this is possibily a stim too.

Soil, so I'm told. 🤮

nothing that wasn't edible but I'd eat whole lemons, put bbq sauce on jelly, eat cabbage and ketchup and all manner of weird things

@BoardLikeAMirror

Soil, so I'm told. 🤮

I remember eating soil too actually
These days I'd be terrified to get e coli or something!

I ate paper, but it was because I was hungry and probably not what you mean.

I've always chewed things like plastic and my fingernails.

I also ate soil, sucked flannels and flushed them down the toilet. Had so many rows for this but it didn't stop me.
Drinking vinegar was another.

I apparently ate soil, sand and wall paper/ paint . I'd peel bit off and chew it . My mother ended up having to redecorate out living room as I had pulled so much paper off the walls and chewed/ eaten it

I used to eat paper.

I tasted things rather than ate them, yes I can remember what cold frosty windows tasted like. And soil - and garden worms!

I loved spicy, vinegary and citrusy things from a young age. I do not like biscuits much.

Omg Lily You've just reminded me of the time when I tried to eat the ice out of the freezer with just my mouth...
I got stuck and my mum had to pour warm water over me to to free me

If we were having sausages for tea I had to turn on the grill and start them off before my mum got home. I used to bite a little bit off the end of each one before I put them in the grill 😳 Raw onions, like you would eat an apple!

Bonio dog shapes.

My mother ended up having to redecorate out living room as I had pulled so much paper off the walls and chewed/ eaten it

That reminded me - not an eating one exactly, but when I was six I got a brand new bedroom when the house was extended and immediately developed a habit of licking my finger, moistening the new paint on the wall next to my bed, and scratching it off. I did quite a large patch before it was noticed! My dad wasn't thrilled at having to repaint it.

@BoardLikeAMirror

My mother ended up having to redecorate out living room as I had pulled so much paper off the walls and chewed/ eaten it

That reminded me - not an eating one exactly, but when I was six I got a brand new bedroom when the house was extended and immediately developed a habit of licking my finger, moistening the new paint on the wall next to my bed, and scratching it off. I did quite a large patch before it was noticed! My dad wasn't thrilled at having to repaint it.

I did something similar. My parents has coving around the ceiling on the way downstairs and used to poke my fingers in it every time I walked past it. They were not happy when they noticed.

@PangoPurrl

If we were having sausages for tea I had to turn on the grill and start them off before my mum got home. I used to bite a little bit off the end of each one before I put them in the grill 😳 Raw onions, like you would eat an apple!

My mum used to let us eat raw sausage and bacon rind

I've just had another memory while reading the book suggested on here.
I used to eat grass. Not the green bit but the root. I'd spend ages sat on the lawn, pulling up the grass and nibbling off the white end.

Paper. Lots of paper. It got to the point my brother wouldn't let me borrow any of his books because he didn't want them eaten. I know what all the different sorts of paper smell, taste, and feel like.

It dwindled off so I stopped tearing strips off round the edges of all the text by around the middle of junior school, and barely ate any paper by senior school (perhaps the odd notebook sheet corner as a treat). I haven't eaten any paper for many years but I still remember everything about it — the different textures on my tongue, the ways different papers clump when you chew them, the speed at which different papers soak through with saliva…

Corrugated cardboard tastes utterly horrendous, btw.

It might not have helped that I was a hyperlexic kid, so from around age 2 onwards I was spending an awful lot of my time with books.

@ClumpingBambooIsALie

Paper. Lots of paper. It got to the point my brother wouldn't let me borrow any of his books because he didn't want them eaten. I know what all the different sorts of paper smell, taste, and feel like.

It dwindled off so I stopped tearing strips off round the edges of all the text by around the middle of junior school, and barely ate any paper by senior school (perhaps the odd notebook sheet corner as a treat). I haven't eaten any paper for many years but I still remember everything about it — the different textures on my tongue, the ways different papers clump when you chew them, the speed at which different papers soak through with saliva…

Corrugated cardboard tastes utterly horrendous, btw.

I love this

I used to chew my hair. My dad told me if I kept it up I'd need an operation to remove the giant clump of hair from my stomach and he told me, "lots of people die during surgery." That stopped my hair chewing.

I also used to chew plastic constantly as well. My Barbie's all had mangled arms and legs. I also had a plastic stool that I used to chew on.

@MrsSkylerWhite

Bonio dog shapes.

Me too, think it was winalot !

I used to lick the glue off envelopes and postage stamps. Eat paper. Chewed the wood off my pencils in school. Once ate a crayon but it made me sick. Ate dandelion leaves and other edible plants outside in the playground. Grew up very hungry.

I used to lick the glue off envelopes and postage stamps.

My dad collected Co-op stamps - equivalent to a modern day loyalty card - you stuck them into paper booklets and when you filled a book you got 50p off or whatever. I used to love licking the stamps and putting them in the book, but my dad was very happy to hand this task over to me!

@ofwarren

I've just had another memory while reading the book suggested on here. I used to eat grass. Not the green bit but the root. I'd spend ages sat on the lawn, pulling up the grass and nibbling off the white end.

I used to love doing this!! The ritual of pulling it up really carefully to get the root, then peeling it the right way to get the super soft inside... Lush!

Shocked that your mum let you eat raw sausage! I used to love the taste, raw or cooked, but then did an about turn when I was 15 and went veggie for a good few years!

Oxo cubes. My mum used to hide them and she'd always know when I'd found them, because I used to try and shove the foil down the sink.

If we're talking about actual food products, then dried pasta, preserving sugar and sweetener tablets are probably the weirdest things I regularly snaffled.

This from a kid who weaned on one specific type of breakfast cereal with one specific kind of milk, and then refused to eat anything else (except bread with one particular brand of margarine) for… a year or two? I don't know how long, all my parents will say was it felt like forever. But they figured that at least Rice Krispies were fortified with various vitamins, and I was getting plenty of calcium