Did your parens ever try to limit or remove your obsessions

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My mom wouldn't let me have toy guns as a kid. That worked out real well.

Just one week no tv and it was torture.

I don't think my parents limited my obsessions. They liked some of them, in fact. When I had an obsession with topography or calendar calculation, they encouraged it. They also never took away my computer when I was obsessing over that. They didn't like it when my obsessions became more personal, eg. my obsessing over autism. Even so they never said I couldn't engage in this obsession.

I think that my husband and I are pretty tolerant of our son's obsessions but my concern is that they usually involve screen time - playing computer games, watching other people playing computer games on youtube etc and I admit I try and and limit it where I can, mainly because I don't feel excessive computer games (we are talking pacman and mario, all age appropriate) will be good for his attention when he starts school, he is only 5. I am very encouraging when he wants to draw or create play doh characters but at the same time I don't want to feel as though he is being punished.

Last edited by Shellfish on 13 Aug 2012, 2:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

My parents were pretty sneaky and passive-aggressive about anything I cherished. I would come home from school to find guitars missing or smashed, model kits gone missing. After a while I stopped caring. Why bother? It's only going to get taken away. Later on in high school DES classes, they changed the routine on me from a pattern that was conducive to learning, to a system set up by some supposed 'special-ed gurus' that really caused me to push the grain. That went so bady the teacher accepted a position at a juvenile facility after a semester of trying to implement it

as a child i was obsessed with a little toilet plunger which i kept around me and slept with like some other kids would keep a teddy bear. they took it away from me and stuck it in a pile of goo.

Yes. But the worst thing is, that in the past I myself considered my obsessions, mannerism, interests and everything "weird" as "f*****g ret*d" and felt deeply ashamed before myself for doing and liking these things.

Now on the other hand, I'm ashamed for having been ashamed in the past.

Same here. Arguing day after day, year after year, getting a punishment after punishment, having things broken, rearranged, stolen ,thrown away, hidden, etc etc. After some time...I just gave up on some things.

It was a sin. Now I know that I should have resisted longer. Despite the fact it was painful and stressful and tiring I should have never given up, on anything.

No, but my friends and cousins did. My younger cousin (who was only 7 at the time) even tried to tell me that I should stop going on about my obsessions a bit, and I felt a little stupid being lectured by a 7-year-old about my obsessions, when I was 15. Then my older cousin sent me an email message telling me that the people who I was obsessed with were moving out of town, but it was a lie because somebody else who knew them told me that they weren't moving, so I knew she just sent that in the hope that I might not want to talk about them so much any more. Then one of my friends at school made herself stop talking to me if I ever mentioned any of their names at all, which was actually helpful because now when I'm with my friends I have gotten so used to not talking about my obsession when my old friend was around that I have gotten used to not talking about them at all to any of my friends. Well, I'm obsessed with new people now anyway, which has made a fresh start.

My parents took EVERYTHING I became obsessed with away. Even when I was becoming very skilled at the violin at 8 years old, they took it away. -.-
Grr.... I also had generally abusive parents though.

And yet if an Aspie took an NT's desire away (to socialise), we'll never hear the end of it!