Childhood behavior: Idea of social interaction non-existent?

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I'm wondering if anyone else had this specific experience in early childhood:

When I was three, I went to a preschool where I never interacted with any of the children or any of the teachers. One of my clearest memories is wandering around a big room where the other kids played with each other or the toys and the teachers watched over the scene. I didn't interact with anyone, but not because I didn't want to or didn't know how to join in. Instead, the very idea of joining in NEVER EVER occurred to me. It wasn't within the range of behaviors that existed in my mind. Also, I didn't play with the toys by myself. I think I was too stressed out by the presence of so many other humans to do anything other than wander aimlessly for the whole day. At home, I played with blocks building huge architectural structures for the whole day.

I'd like to hear about other people's childhood experiences, especially if social interaction didn't even occur to you at an age when most children would have sought out each other to play. I think I finally learned that interacting with peers was a possibility when I was 8 or 9, but of course I still didn't know how.

Meerkateer:

Yes! Pretty much that exact experience in preschool (2-5). The idea of being anything but an observer was not in my mind.

I don't know if you have siblings or not, but having a younger sibling I could interact with put an end to that. Not sure if it would have continued through age 8 or 9 like for you otherwise, but it certainly could have.

I did not experience this because I am NT, but you have described my 5 yr old AS son to a tee. Thanks for sharing this because it gives me some insight into what is going on in his head. He is an only child too. However, he does tend to want to socialize with the teachers.

I was in kindergarden at age four, and I basically played with one toy by myself in my own world all the time, and would get bothered if others tried to enter mine. If we played out on the playground I would mostly take in the scenery or be self- engrossed.

_________________
Turn away from all the things of men- Turn away from the old deeds of sin- Turn away (,follow me,) ta never feed what's been- Turn away -- Jesus
the five senses are overrated
So, what is this relating thing you speak of?

Childhood behavior: Idea of social interaction non-existent? As a very young child, I was pretty much an observer only. I do not recall playing with toys. Slowly I became aware that others my age looked at toys differently - from trucks, to robots, to plastic radio sets, to anti-aircraft warfare ack-ack gun toys. Decades later about 95% of all those experiences could be explained along the lines of: undiagnosed central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), undiagnosed mild constructional apraxia, undiagnosed mild dyspraxia, and undiagnosed ADHD Inattentive. Other words: sensory integration, whole (forest) vs parts (trees), attention span, sustained attention, working/short term memory, medium term memory, long term memory; sequencing; sustained memory; neurology; symptoms of petit/absence which were not petit/absence but were undiagnosed ADHD Inattentive.

In my earliest memories of school, the school was empty. I can remember the rooms, the playground, and sometimes a teacher, but no children.

My experience is slightly different. Generally, when I was a child I had one friend at school. I was pretty close to that person. In some cases, that friend took pleasure in hurting me, but I didn't mind, because he was my friend. The idea of expanding my social circle to more than a few people made no sense to me. The odd thing is that at the time that I started getting interested in interacting with more people, I found that people did not want to interact with me.

Yep, that's pretty much my experience too. When I was a child I just kind of drifted in between the other kids, ignoring them, pretty much oblivious.

I don't think I started interacting in a relational fashion until around the age of ten or thereabouts. Before that it was mostly requests, demands, responses to others' actions or to others' questions, etc.; functional communication rather than interaction for interaction's sake.

Nowadays I interact readily, but I still don't really form attachments all that easily. It's not that I'm shy; I've actually got no problems with talking to people, even doing public speaking; but I don't really have a people-focused life. It's an odd variation of the "aloof" interaction style that people talk about all the time as being present in autistic kids--I interact; but it just doesn't feel like a significant activity to me.

My main interaction is with the world of information...

Oddly enough, I actually care about people deeply, because people are almost like specialized, fascinating, sentient pieces of information to me, just like I myself am a sentient collection of information. In fact, I first started interacting with other people willingly when I realized they had information I did not have and could not obtain from books. To me, every human being is a little universe, and communication is the only way to transfer information between the two spaces...

I care about people I do not know nearly as much as I care about people I do know, and about people who I have never met nearly as much as I care about people I see daily. I can be distressed by the misfortune of a perfect stranger just as I can be distressed by the misfortune of someone I know and like. I don't know what this says about me. Maybe I'm just not really attached to the rest of the world socially... maybe I just don't see why "Person I Know" is supposed to be fundamentally more important than "Person I Don't Know".

I wonder are those people who didn't think to interact with other children are an only child?
I'm the youngest of four siblings. Even though I never played with them or kids at school, and I don't remember what I thought when I was four years old, later on it was just a lack of interest. I do remember being told when going to a petting zoo with a pre-kindy group that I screamed and cried for my mother.

Nope, I have two sisters.

That was my experience.
I could see that the other children socialised, but I didn't see that it had anything to do with me. It looked boring.
I'm not an only child.

I remember being taken to childrens parties when I was a kid and just completley feaking when we arrived and having to be taken home again by my mother. I did the same thing at school, was always far happy in the company of adults than my peers. Now I'm happeier in the company of children!

Interacted with my sisters.

Third grade joined in some run and throw play.

Senior year high school recruited into a set of slightly eccentrics.

Generally, though, no initiating, losts of watching from sidelines, rarely more than one social interactor.