Imagination Stations
Play time is their time with the occasional parental guest star.
To some extent, independent play is still hard to come by in our house. This mostly comes from our son, who largely has more routines than games. For example, one of his favorite activities is to take a piece from a puzzle of numbers and run it across the house to the living room couch, count to said number, and then run back to the puzzle, get another piece, and so on. This usually involves another adult running alongside him.
But he, and his sister, have exploded in imaginative play in the last few months. It didn’t strike me until they were taking their baths the other day. They have Pixar Cars bath toys that they enjoy playing with. His sister, who bathes first, was playing with the cars by driving them through the water and making the cars sound effects. If I recall correctly, she was even saying he was “swimming,” something she was in lessons for at the time. Her brother went into the bath next, and as the water drained from the tub, he took Lightning McQueen on a tour of the different places in the tub.
“Maybe he’ll come up the hill, then go down, down, down, and come up again to the wash junction!”
The remarkable thing that he’s beginning to do is implement his own life into his play. He’s taking the locations that he’s come up with a name for and pulling them in as he plays. One of the library branches near us has a train set with a bridge component that he models after a raised roadway (“the new bridge”) right down the street from the library. He puts up trees and other buildings around the railway, too.
At my parents’ house he works wooden railway there as I used to: he tells stories. He sets some trains off to the side in the same localized area, the Station, while another train pulls a coach or train. At our house, when we had the wooden railway set up in the living room (the table has since been cleared…and is occasionally climbed on like a dance stage) he would attach five specific trains together to go up and down some raised railways and intentionally leave some behind, as the train had “broken its couplings, and had to go back!”
Meanwhile, his sister is busy exploring all the other toys in the house. She flies airplanes, drives cars, takes babies on walks. She plays with some Little People sets alongside her baby dolls, too.
When she plays like this, with her dolls and stuffed animals, her impressive language skills truly shine. She talks with them and about them to us, she describes them and asks us questions about them. Her language journey has been nothing short of impressive as she quickly tries to catch up with her older brother who is 20 months her senior.
The most obvious form of imaginative play our son exhibits is through Little Bear (not the character, just a stuffed animal named Little Bear), the unofficial fifth member of the family and someone who needs to have a post fully dedicated to1. Little Bear does a lot, and wants a lot.
As a child on the spectrum it’s entirely possible that our son is speaking to us, sometimes, through Little Bear. “Little Bear is sad,” “Little Bear wants to dance,” “Little Bear needs a snack,” etc. But I think, at times, to him, Little Bear has genuine wants and our son is not going to deny him these things. Little Bear wants to climb the stairs alongside our son, Little Bear wants to run with him, Little Bear wants to sit in the grocery cart, Little Bear wants that chocolate donut (okay maybe not so much that last one).
I think it goes beyond projecting these things onto Little Bear and has become something more. It’s become a whole personality and game and imaginative friend/world for our son to explore. He uses Little Bear as a means of understanding himself and the world around them.
Perhaps what I’m about to say next is controversial, because it’s about…screen time.
I’m of the belief that screen time is fine in moderation, and that, within that moderation, there are still shows that are categorically better than others. Ms. Rachel, Caitie’s Classroom, and Sesame Street are always going to be better than AI slop or Cocomelon. Moderated, low-stim (and preferably educational) shows are, in my eyes, fine.
Plus, they can be informative for a developing mind. You won’t believe the amount of times we’re doing our own iteration of the Ms. Rachel show, or doing activities we watched on Caitie’s Classroom. “It’s car wash, like Carl’s Car Wash!” A lot of how my son models his play with trains is through Thomas & Friends thanks to the ease with which the early seasons told their stories, and my daughter loves to sing and dance along to some of the old musical numbers, too.
Our son has derived tons of games from some of the programs he watches. One we’re a big fan of right now is a video that combines several of the toys he regularly plays with to invent some numbers, colors, and shapes games:
When he goes off to play, he takes some of the lessons from this video and applies it to his own numbers, colors, and puzzles he has on hand.
From other videos we enjoy watching, he learned how to organize his shapes and play with his trains around them.
I don’t want to put the full onus of learning how to play on these videos, but I think they’re so comforting to him that he wants to find that same comfort and enjoyment on his own through exploring his toys.
This, in turn, inspires his sister, who runs around pretending to be an airplane or finds new things to ask us to draw for her.
There have been many times in the last couple of months where they simply exist in their play space, something that felt impossible at the start of the year. They still need eyes on them (at any moment our daughter can overturn a full bucket of crayons and then eat half of them), but they’re able to exist on their own and within the bounds of the games they play.
On one side of the room is our son with a numbers puzzle, bucket of small bears, and colored buckets. He pulls a number off the puzzle, counts the bears, and puts them in the bucket. Just behind him is our daughter, pulling books out of the shelf or finding her own puzzles to tinker with.
I don’t remember the days as a toddler before my independent play, where I’d push myself along the floor with my trains, emulating stories I’d seen on Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. I simply came into my own conscious mind already doing these things, and I think this will largely hold true for both of my children, though they seem to be catching onto this long before I did. I’m seeing the genesis of how they will play individually and, in a much smaller glimmer, together (this, unfortunately, will probably take a lot longer for all of us to figure out). It’s enthralling and fills my heart more than I thought I could bear.
They’re little people, little friends, making their way through their burgeoning minds and imaginations, pushing the bounds of play as they knew it as babies into something more creative and exciting.
To preview: this is our son’s comfort stuffy, his proclaimed “best friend,” and something that even our group of friends are keenly aware of to the point where, once, we thought we lost him on a nature trail and it was almost an “Avengers Assemble” level event to come out and find Little Bear. He has since been Air Tagged.