Using Your Child's Obsessions for Good

Two scenes from my son's early childhood:

When my son was three, a preschool teacher and I did not see eye to eye. She saw him hand me a set of keys to play with -- keys being his obsession -- and she set me straight. No keys! I must not give in to his interest in keys! "Keys are death to him," she insisted.

Not long afterward, I took my son to see Sharon Cermak, an occupational therapist at Boston University who was doing research on kids adopted from Eastern Europe. This expert on sensory integration was going to evaluate my guy for SI problems, but she was having trouble getting him to go along. When he flatly refused to crawl onto a swinging platform, I took out my keys and mentioned to an assistant that they might help -- wondering, as I did, if I would get a preschool-teacher-like smackdown. But no; the assistant brought the keys to Cermak, who immediately put them on the platform. My son bopped right on after them, and the evaluation continued.

That second encounter gave me a fairly high degree of confidence that I was doing the right thing in using my son's obsessions to lead him into developmental and therapeutic territory that he might not otherwise agree to enter. If your child had an object of intense interest, rather than follow conventional wisdom and break the perseverative chain, try using it to pull your child out of his inner world. It may be the "key" to increased interaction. For more ideas, read "Magnificent Obsessions: Using Your Child's Perseverative Interests for Good."