Imagination kicks in

[KezT]

DS, AS aged 9 has never done any imaginative play, never dressed up, and never joined in any make believe games.

 

Until a couple of weeks ago - when he suddenly found his imagination! One day he started wheeling his cars along roads, flying his aeroplanes noisily through the sky and offering me cups of tea and cake made out of plastic. It seems his imagination has finally kicked in!

 

Obviously, most kids do this at about age 3 or 4, when everything is new and everything is accepted and dealt with by instinct. Poor DS is 9, and very "academic" in his thinking. he likes to explain everything and have an explanation for everything. He is quite anxious about suddenly "seeing and hearing things inside my brain". Rather unfortunately, he googled it and read up loads of stuff on MH problems I have tried to put his mind at rest about that at least, but he is still struggling to learn how to differentiate between reality and imagination.

 

This is something that I learned to do instinctively before I can remember so I have not got much to offer - does anyone here have any clever ideas for him? Having never imagined anything before, he finds it hard to tell when he has really done something or when he has just imagined doing it, and feels his brain is letting him down.

 

Hopefully he will learn to tell the difference in time, but any help I can give would be great.

 

He has discussed it at CAMHS - we are all quite sure there is no MH issue.

 

thanks

[zenemu]

DS, AS aged 9 has never done any imaginative play, never dressed up, and never joined in any make believe games.

 

Until a couple of weeks ago - when he suddenly found his imagination! One day he started wheeling his cars along roads, flying his aeroplanes noisily through the sky and offering me cups of tea and cake made out of plastic. It seems his imagination has finally kicked in!

 

Obviously, most kids do this at about age 3 or 4, when everything is new and everything is accepted and dealt with by instinct. Poor DS is 9, and very "academic" in his thinking. he likes to explain everything and have an explanation for everything. He is quite anxious about suddenly "seeing and hearing things inside my brain". Rather unfortunately, he googled it and read up loads of stuff on MH problems I have tried to put his mind at rest about that at least, but he is still struggling to learn how to differentiate between reality and imagination.

 

This is something that I learned to do instinctively before I can remember so I have not got much to offer - does anyone here have any clever ideas for him? Having never imagined anything before, he finds it hard to tell when he has really done something or when he has just imagined doing it, and feels his brain is letting him down.

 

Hopefully he will learn to tell the difference in time, but any help I can give would be great.

 

He has discussed it at CAMHS - we are all quite sure there is no MH issue.

 

thanks

 

Hi Kez,

 

This could be a very good thing indeed. I am sure it will take "DS", a while to get used to this, but as he is Academic, it will allow him to visualize and understand the things he is interested in and will open up a whole new vista of learning for him. As Einstein said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge".

 

Hopefully it will help him learn to socialise a little easier. Having AS myself, I can tell you that as a child I had an extremely active imagination. The only thing I would say is that because of that I was much happier playing on my own than I was with other children, so that is something to watch out for, because at that age the more he can learn to socialise with other kids, the better.

 

Zen