Stim - acting out video scenes

June 5, 2002

Dear All,

I wonder if anyone had encountered the following pattern with their child and

had successfully dealt with it. Please share.

My son has lately developed a stimming pattern which we are finding very

difficult to eliminate or reduce. Most of his old stims involved objects (like

arranging numbers according to the timer on the video player or peeling off bits

of everything soft enough to peel and throwing it into the toilet bowl!!) and we

kind of made the objects disappeared and the stims stopped after some tantrums.

However now that he is a master of imitation skills (NVI and VI) he is onto

acting, complete with all the different voice intonation and sound effects; and

we have nothing to take away or hide as it is within him. We had tried stopping

him watching the videos for a period of time but his memory skills beat us to it

- he would still be acting out long after not watching the videos. He could

virtually act out most of the scenes in his favourite videos (and he has a lot

of them - over 200). While it was funny to see him do that in the beginning, we

think it is getting way out of hand. He does that all the time when he is out of

therapy sessions and not engaged in any interesting activities and he refused to

play with the toys which he had liked very much before. Sometimes we could

interrupt him (eg by saying " pause first, let's go...) but when he has started

acting out his current most favoured video, he would threw a major tantrum if

someone interrupts him. There are some good parts to it though, eg he would ask

us to join in and be part of the props for his show!

Should we stopped the videos all together? Would that discouraged him from

verbalising or imitating?

Please email me privately at yarch@... as I have limited access to the

group mail. Thanks.

Regards,

mom to HZ (3y8m - ASD) and ZH (1y7m - NT)

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