Did you parents try to take away your special interests?

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I was never allowed to talk about mine as a kid, but I did anyway. When I did though, I got the feeling everyone else was annoyed and didn't care. Or I was old that the adults needed a break from hearing about meerkats or Lion King for the umpteenth time or that it isn't "right" to talk about the same thing over and over again...yet other people were allowed to talk about the same thing over and over again and the same people who told me it was somehow "wrong" to talk about meerkats all the time would talk about the same thing over and over again. Yet somehow, it was okay for other people to talk about the same thing over and over again. Maybe it was just meerkats and Lion King that were "wrong" somehow...then maybe it was ME that wasn't allowed to talk about them.

My mom would threaten to take away my stuffed meerkats and pictures now and then but never went through with it. She did take away things that helped me get access on meerkats or things that she did not realize was a special interests (i.e. making my own video games). She felt that had to be "earned". For every hour, I cooperated in school without a meltdown, I got half an hour of computer time. My mom felt like everything had to be "earned". Every-time I had a meltdown, I would loose an hour or sometimes all of it and she would taunt me about it...making the meltdown worse and thereby making me loose even more time. I tried to explain this to the therapists, but they had no clue about autism and agreed with my mother. However, I think if she took away my physical meerkat collection, I would have committed suicide. Meerkats were practically my identity.

Last edited by MagicMeerkat on 29 May 2017, 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, especially my dad if the special interest wasn't socially acceptable.

How did he "take it away"?

Nobody tried to take anything away from me but I was, rightly I think now, warned not to let the special interests take over my life. I was frustrated with myself that I let them get so out of control. I have learned to use my interests as social outlets and as a means to find people with similar interests.

I was always told to not talk about them and things like "Shut up about .....!", which always hurt. I, however, loved and still love talking about my special interests and would get told by my family "This is why no one likes you or wants to play with you!"

However, no one ever really tried to take them away, because my mom and sister always bought me everything they could find related to whatever movie or TV show I was into at the time. Mixed messages, I guess. It wasn't until I discovered the internet and especially WP and Tumblr, that I found people who were willing to chat with me about my special interests because they shared them too.

He would yell at me really loudly and get angry, so I stopped. Hid books.

Nope. If anything, they fed them. Dad would take me to the library and help me find and check out piles of books. He'd take me to the museum and arrange personnel tours after hours of the exhibits that were part of my special interest. He tried to spark my interest in some of his, and they both tried share in mine sometimes. They paid for lessons and searched out camps for certain ones.

I can relate to a lot of what's been said, but I'm wondering if my situation is unusual or not among aspies. Many people talk about parents or other authority figures thwarting their special interests even when they were young, but my experience went differently.

Basically, my interests in aviation, space, and sci fi were actually encouraged by my parents when I was young, and even when I got a bit obsessed with things it was never a problem, and overall, there were no social skills problems- I had friends, and in fact many times made friends through my interests.

It was only when I got older, around the time I started middle school, that it became a problem, but it was more of a made up problem- my parents attitudes suddenly changed and they were acting like my geeky interests were the cause of the contrived drama in the family, and their efforts to stop my interests got really obnoxious- correcting me if I used a "big word" the way most people would bust a child for cursing or using bad grammar, or damn near applauding when showing me something negative in the news about the Space Shuttle (early 80s), and gloating and acting like they had scored some huge victory every time I had to miss a favorite TV show or when weekend chores kept me away from whatever nerdy thing I had planned for that weekend- planning menial tasks that weren't real work but blatant time wasting activities.

The mystery to me always has been why they changed their attitude about it? From what I've been able to figure out and from what they've admitted to later on, my interests weren't an ongoing problem, but my parents apparently had been "warned" by someone at my school to do something about my behavior or else. And I also suspect that they had read about autism, saw some similarities between autistic traits and my odd but harmless behaviors that I now know were attempts to deal with sensory issues. We didn't know about Asperger's or other learning disabilities back then but I know they really ran with the totally f'ed up idea that geeky equals intellectually disabled, so I was at times being called the 'r' word when I did something "smart" or acted a bit more mature than my age. I actually had to resort to playing along with acting a bit childish to be treated like a "normal" person.

Last edited by Simon01 on 29 May 2017, 8:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, to the point that I was completely banned from anything science fiction. In reaction I stopped reading all science fiction for years. I had to sneak anime and am still a transformers fan after all this time but I feel horribly guilty about most things I like because I am constantly being reminded that is weird for a 49 year old woman to be into. At least my boyfriend gets it and has been helping me to unlearn feeling guilty for watching Alien and Star Wars stuff.

For me more like trying to get me to participate more outside of my special interests, so I'm not glued to a single thing all day. Being nonverbal gives me the advantage of not talking about it when away from it.

My mother's been trying to force me to dress "normally", not knowing that how I dress is normal to me. This has been going on for at least eleven years.

Great that your boyfriend is so supportive. The more I research Asperger's, I get the idea that while special interests can be a problem if they get out of hand, *a lot* of the hostility from families and outright banning seems more to do with someone having geeky or intellectual interests and being on the spectrum is an easy go-to excuse to use to "punish" having the interests regardless of how much or how little one actually indulges their interests. I know for me, it was never a major issue but thwarting my interests became my family's obsession while trying to convince me I was the one with the unhealthy and socially unacceptable interests. I did the same thing you did, hid things for a while but thing got a bit easier when I got older. And I have a friend who is a major geek, and she turned 50 a couple of months ago. She celebrated by traveling to Disneyland with her husband, and they've lots of photos of themselves having a blast around all the Star Wars attractions

I always was proud of managing to stay focused on what I liked despite efforts to force an interest in other things. Really, "diversifying interests" is just a euphemism for "taking away someone's favorite things". When I was forced to spend time away from something I liked, it was made worse by having to talk about boring things other people liked when I'd rather get quiet and ignore them until they learned to read social cues and see that I wasn't interested in what they were doing. If my interests were considered obsessions, fine, then I could call someone else's attempts to police someone else's interests an obsession.

I say all of this because my family's efforts were more about getting me so sick of never being allowed to enjoy things I liked that I'd somehow give up my interests. I'm happy to say, that never happened.

It's one of those things where it seems like no one else has a problem with it, so why does your mother try to make a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be? I still chided sometimes by my parents for appearing to wear the same clothes all the time, when in reality it might be several days or more between times I see them, and I happen have a lot of things that look similar because I like the feel and style, but it's not literally the same thing all the time.

When I was young my special interest was Led Zeppelin. I knew every song on every album, how long each song was, where it was recorded, all the tours and cities they played in etc. I played their records from the moment I woke up in the morning and fell asleep listening to them. My parents hated it. When I was 10 my Mum took me to a child psychiatrist because she and my Father couldn't handle it anymore. The psychiatrist listened to her complaints, talked to me for bit then asked Mum if she would be so upset if it was Mozart instead of Zeppelin. She never complained about my special interest after that My Father did but Mum would stand up for me and she bought me headphones so he couldn't hear it and I was only allowed to talk about Zeppelin when he wasn't home which was thankfully often.

My mum tried to take Hogan's Heroes away from me last February. She told me that she wasn't sure that I should be watching that show. She also tried to stop me from wearing my German helmets. She also flipped out when she opened the closed door to the spare bedroom and caught me wearing a self-made helmet, with a German flag in my hand. She told me that she wished I never found my favourite show and not to bring the helmet again. If I did, she would destroy it. I didn't bring the helmet again. Two months later, I told her that I prefer Germany over Britain, Britain was a mask I hid behind and that I can't and won't grow up the way that she wants me to.