Passion or Problem?

As parents of kids with Autism, we receive many cautions about our children’s passions.  The professionals in our children’s lives are concerned that with too much focus, a passion can turn into an unhealthy myopic focus that interrupts the flow of daily life.

So, how do we know? I’d suggest that to keep things simple, ask yourself one question: Is this causing a problem? To help illustrate, here are some examples.

Michael loves trains! He watches train movies, plays with train toys, looks at train pictures, and reads train books.  Most of all, he loves big, loud, whizzing by at full speed trains (from inside the safety of our car)…you get the idea. It is a passion! He also has other interests. He is able to put down the train toy and get on the bus to school. This is not causing a problem, so my not-so-professional opinion is – not a problem. We embrace his passion and encourage it!

At one point, Michael was repetitively drawing eyes.  I’ll be honest, it got creepy. Sometimes, pages and pages filled with eyes. He was resistant to drawing other things and practicing his handwriting, so I did think it was interfering.  Yes, this is a grey area, but since it was cringe-worthy, I deemed it a problem.  I removed the video he was watching that showed the parts of the face, I blocked the drawing of eyes and we started doing some step by step drawings of animals or vehicles to refocus his passion for drawing onto a variety of subjects.

Finally, Michael went through a phase where all he wanted to consume was strawberry milk and puffed Cheetos.  This one was a clear and obvious health concern. Verdict? Problem.  For this one, I tried to get him to eat other foods, but when I did, he was gagging and I was worried that he would choke. We needed professional help and we sought out a local feeding expert to help us over this hurdle.  Forever positive in our outlook, we called it ‘Foodie Camp’ and despite our upbeat attitude, it was a difficult phase in Mikey’s development. Now, he eats what I would call ‘an acceptable variety’ of foods including fruits and vegetables.

Note: he’s not a foodie by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s at a place where I feel confident we won’t be the first case of scurvy in our town in the last 200 years…take the win, mom.

Big Idea: Don’t kill every passion because you have heard that kids who have autism can become fixated on things. Assess your child’s hobbies individually and decide whether a particular interest is becoming a problem.  Address the problems, not the passions. And really, who doesn’t love trains?