What do you thiink of this article

[ShadeofViolet]

Its in the DM so I do aplogise (Ignore the comments!)

here

The comments weren't too bad earlier. Why on earth has the child not been assessed?

Sounds to me like it's SN (ASD?) leading to the Thomas obsession and echolalia rather than the TV-watching leading to SN.

Could be worse - he could be stuck in the DM world repeating boring cliches about parents causing 'whatever' by bad parenting.

Could be worse - could be teletubbies! My lot have learnt letters and colours thanks to Thomas and his Friends!

Teletubbies are good too - DS learned to sing songs from them

i've been green-ing all the comments suggesting SN/ASD rather than bad parenting. Yep, sounds like some sort of SN/language impairment. Night Garden and Dora inspired DS's first real substitutive pretend play.

Glad you all thought exactly the same as I did when I first read it - it sounds exactly like my DS - Peppa Pig and Mr Tumble is all he talks about, sometimes randomly, sometimes in context.

And he doesnt socialise with the children in school either.

, I really hope someone with some sense assesses that little lad and gives the mum some support, Dd1 did the thomas thing but Dd3's preferred obbsession was Come outside, the one with the areoplane and the dog.

It is SO obvious that the child in question needs to be assessed for possibly ASD, that I even thought, this article has to be a joke. Seriously? Nobody mentioned in the article has thought that the kid watches TV for 5 hours and repeats all the stuff BECAUSE there is some difficulty there, rather than the other way round?

FGS!! What a lot of rubbish that he is trapped into a world of his own while at nursery because he watches too much tv at home.
Echolalia and ASD are the first things that came to my mind.

DD 2.5 y (nt) ends up watching a fair bit amount of tv because Disney dvds and Thomas, and Mario on the Wii are part of DS (asd) 's obsessions. And she has no communication issues nor has difficulties interacting with others at nursery.

When DS was the same age, SALT tried to blame us for his speech delays. Apparently we should have cut down on the tv time and remove the dummy completely (even at night)... what do you do when you have a child who would scream all day long if he wasn't alllowed the TV.

I think this article is a lot of s**t!!

Hopefully the specialist he is seeing will be able to help him.

Don't you mean she? - the author is a woman

"Could be worse - he could be stuck in the DM world repeating boring cliches about parents causing 'whatever' by bad parenting."

Spot on!

DS1 did the Thomas thing, too. One of his first "words" was "Tickiwimdissyyayapo!" and he leanred to tell me things using phrases from Peppa Pig.

I'm such a horribly bad mum.

What a crock of sh*t.
Can't stand the DM so I am not surprised at this article

I read this out to dh and said "sound familiar?" The first thing we thought of was autism. FGS there are so many ASD children addicted to 'Thomas and friends' that the National Autistic Society sells the merchandise in their online shop. They also have all this on their website.

How can the so-called 'specialist' in California not have made the connection in an instant?

ouryve - was that 'tinkywinky, dipsy, lala, po' Very good if it was, i could never remember those wretched lovely characters names

LOL at the NAS website:

"Effects of 'Thomas the Tank Engine' and 'The Transporters' on theory of mind in autism"

Thanx for that pixel it made me laff, oh and by the way it doesn't work, Dd1[22] was obsessed with TTE and she still has crap ToM

"Doctors are so alarmed that they have reported his behaviour in a paper published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics."
Seriously? . This lad is showing classic signs of ASD and the doctors are reporting it without any indication that this has been looked at? .
Ds1 still repeats things he has heard from dvds and also from the computer and books. He never spends hours on them, but he focuses on parts of them and incorporates them into his own language. Eg he might say "halfway there I stopped to have a rest", which is from Mr Small. Ds2 can't talk, but he too wanders round his reception class ignoring all other children and instead just signing the same tunes over and over, or shouting out "Meemee Maamaa" (Mr Tumble). Again he watches tv, but it's limited.
I am sick and tired of ignorant sods believing that all parents with children like mine do is plac them in front of the tv and ignore them.

place them in front of the tv.