Distractions for 5 year old with a technology perseveration.

[preWarp]

My 5 year old, during a particular duration, will configure a specific electronic device over and over again for hours. He can be dissuaded from his "passions" but I need new ideas. I want to succeed in cohabitating with this youngster who is fascinated with the basics of electronic gadgets. I need him to be lured away from his interests long enough to pursue something else. It could be something going on at home like meal time. Or it could be we want him to do something besides screen time with a 24" TV. Like maybe paint with finger paint. Play with playdough. Help with taking out bathroom waste basket. Doing assignments from school like drawing shapes. I have a few educational games on an iPad that I would like him to do. But it's like "hey let's go do this" and he seems so engrossed in changing the backgrounds on a smart phone. Anything tech he likes. I have plans to introduce him to NFC eink displays. They are electronic displays that you can draw an image upon using the NFC function of a smart phone. But if I do that I am thinking of using it as a tool to draw him away from what ever remote control he is repeatedly tearing the batteries from. Do you understand what kind of ideas I need from you to help me work with his habits? I want him to paint, to help cook, to eat, to do homework from school, to learn new vocabulary words, to work on a simple jigsaw puzzle.

 

[Outdated]

Do you understand what kind of ideas I need from you to help me work with his habits? I want him to paint, to help cook, to eat, to do homework from school, to learn new vocabulary words, to work on a simple jigsaw puzzle.

Perhaps it's the wording, but sadly I think I do understand. Have you ever tried figuring out what he wants instead of what you want?

Every single toy I ever had as a kid got pulled apart to see how it works, and through that I also learned how to put them back together again. Mechanical aptitude. Later in life that became cars, complex industrial machinery and computers.

I hated drawing and painting, my sister loved it but I hated it. I still hate it 60 years later.

Meals at the table were fine only if my father wasn't home.

I never did my own homework. I did my older sister's homework for her because she struggled with it but for myself school was a complete waste of time and I couldn't be bothered with it.

I did enjoy reading and ended up with a far better vocabulary than most, the English language became a special interest for quite a few years when I was in my teens.

I also found jigsaw puzzles boring. Trying to put Mum's sewing machine back together again was much more fun.

If you also want him to play with other kids all the time and to enjoy ball sports then you're likely to be disappointed there as well.

 

[Jumpinbare]

My 5 year old, during a particular duration, will configure a specific electronic device over and over again for hours. He can be dissuaded from his "passions" but I need new ideas. I want to succeed in cohabitating with this youngster who is fascinated with the basics of electronic gadgets. I need him to be lured away from his interests long enough to pursue something else. It could be something going on at home like meal time. Or it could be we want him to do something besides screen time with a 24" TV. Like maybe paint with finger paint. Play with playdough. Help with taking out bathroom waste basket. Doing assignments from school like drawing shapes. I have a few educational games on an iPad that I would like him to do. But it's like "hey let's go do this" and he seems so engrossed in changing the backgrounds on a smart phone. Anything tech he likes. I have plans to introduce him to NFC eink displays. They are electronic displays that you can draw an image upon using the NFC function of a smart phone. But if I do that I am thinking of using it as a tool to draw him away from what ever remote control he is repeatedly tearing the batteries from. Do you understand what kind of ideas I need from you to help me work with his habits? I want him to paint, to help cook, to eat, to do homework from school, to learn new vocabulary words, to work on a simple jigsaw puzzle.

You have a young me. I repaired my first table model radio (built in the late 1920s) when I was 6. I had not been taught anything about electronics, and had not yet been introduced to the public library. There was definitely beginner's luck involved in the repair, but it cemented my interest in electronics.
Many, if not most, autistic persons have difficulty keeping a job. My interest in electronics went from an intense interest to a fulfilling hobby, to a career. I retired from my last job in electronic troubleshooting and repair, specializing in radio and laser devices, after working at the same company for 32 years.
It was not any social or other aspect that kept me there. I pretty much just tolerated the work environment. But I got paid to fool with electronics 40 hours a week!!

 

[preWarp]

The Roku is known as a user friendly interface for streaming movies & TV shows. My son has a Roku TV. He also has a different TV that uses an external Roku streaming box. There is an app you can download for either Apple or Android devices that lets you use your device as a remote control for the Roku. Somehow he got that app installed on an iPad mini and was controlling his Roku streaming box. But he could not get it to work with his Roku TV. Yesterday I came home from work to discover he figured out how to use the app with his Roku TV. This time the app was running on a smart phone. He was listening to the TV sound through the phone.

 

[Misery]

It can definitely be hard to get a kid to pull away from that sort of thing, I think.

I was kinda similar as a kid, I was introduced to tech at a young age (though this was in the early 80s so it was very different stuff) and once that happened I was entirely glued to it. Took control of the family PC and pretty much everything else in the house. Getting me to do other things was pretty difficult. Not that I didnt do anything else, but still, I know I didnt deviate from my usual stuff very easily.

What did help though, and what still does help, is sorta combining the tech with the non-tech.

Like, drawing for instance. If you've got an iPad and either have or can get that pencil thing Apple makes, that can be a good start to drawing without having to necessarily buy a whole new device. There's a lot of options for specific apps on that thing, of varying complexity. From what you say it sounds like he'd enjoy the sorts of apps where the UI is mostly presented on the screen and you're expected to interact with it, as opposed to something like Procreate which hides 90% of it's functions.

One idea I've had just for myself in terms of keeping motivated with the non-tech art is to sorta then combine it, I can produce something digital, and print it out and combine that with the physical, my paints and markers and such. I havent actually done this yet, because I dont have a printer, but the idea sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe something like that, for art?

I wish I had better suggestions for you, but what I know of my own experience, and also from what I've seen of many others who are into tech in general (and I dont mean stuff like social media on a phone), is that it's just hard to pull them away from it, at any age.

And some things may prove tougher than others. Homework can definitely be an issue, most kids dont want to do that to begin with, so for someone with a tendency to hyperfocus on something that isnt homework, that becomes even harder to do. Pretty much just never did it at all myself.


One thing I will suggest though is to look carefully at any app you might give him before doing it. Like, the bit about educational games on the iPad. Educational games are really notorious for being terrible. The education part can be nice and all (or not), but if the "game" part cant match that quality (and almost all of them dont) the whole thing will just push kids away from it and make them less likely to even try something like that in the future. At a certain point, just seeing "educational" on a game/toy can just cause immediate revulsion. That doesnt mean there arent any genuinely good things of that type, of course. But there are so very many such products that mostly just rely on pulling in clueless parents to just see the "educational" label and buy it based on that without looking into it further. A very unfortunate and rather slimy tactic for sure, and also very common.

 

[Outdated]

Yesterday I came home from work to discover he figured out how to use the app with his Roku TV. This time the app was running on a smart phone. He was listening to the TV sound through the phone.

That's pretty damn clever for his age.

The biggest mistake my father and the public school system made with me was in trying to make me be like everyone else. For many of us this simply is not possible and all they achieved was to traumatise me and make me hate the world I lived in. It never stopped them though, not once did anyone try to cater to my strengths or allow me to excel at anything. I became successful in later life in spite of them rather than because of them.

Many of us mature differently than neurotypical children. Children are not capable of understanding things until the parts of their brain necessary for for that particular type of processing have finished forming. Autistic children have a different growth pattern in the order in which everything happens.

Intellectual maturity starts happening at a much younger age for us than NT kids.
Social maturity starts happening at a much later age than for NT kids.

At age 10 I could have completed high school if they had allowed me. Also at age 10 I had the social maturity of a 5 year old which meant all the other kids could and did lord it over me and they made my life miserable.

Instead school was just a torture chamber where I was continuously made to try and fit in with the other kids and my academic abilities were completely ignored. Most of my school life was spent with my face buried in a book. Not school books, Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov, Spike Milligan and JRR Tolkein. It was a form of escapism, as long as I was lost in a thrilling story I was out of school.

As for school work for me, at the beginning of every year they give you a collection of text books, I'd sit down and read them over a weekend. I have an eidetic memory, that was my schooling completed for the year, I knew I was going to get straight As for everything and I always did. By comparison the other kids had to repeat the same lessons over and over year in and year out, it took most of them 12 years to learn their times tables and many couldn't even manage that.

 

[preWarp]

I was kinda similar as a kid, I was introduced to tech at a
Like, drawing for instance. If you've got an iPad and either have or can get that pencil thing Apple makes, that can be a good start to drawing without having to necessarily buy a whole new device.

One idea I've had just for myself in terms of keeping motivated with the non-tech art is to sorta then combine it, I can produce something digital, and print it out and combine that with the physical, my paints and markers and such. I haven't actually done this yet, because I don't have a printer, but the idea sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe something like that, for art?

One thing I will suggest though is to look carefully at any app you might give him before doing it. Like, the bit about educational games on the iPad. Educational games are really notorious for being terrible.

One idea I had was he likes changing wallpaper/backgrounds for an operating system, why not ask him if he wants to change the background on "grandma's old computer", which is a Pentium 2 running Windows 98 SE. Usually he changes backgrounds on his smart phone why not ask him to do it on one of his tablets? Maybe I could just look for apps by UI and UX (user interface/eXperience). Or by description of the UI.

I was also considering simple electronics projects, like illuminating and LED, using conductive paint. You mentioned artwork. I bet you could make some interesting art with painted on conductors and tiny surface mount LEDs - really no different from any other thing with tiny flashing LEDs except you are using conductive paint to do it on a canvas.

About the educational apps I chose letter school and Starfall. Another is a coloring game by binimini. These have been great games...but how to get him to use them when he is plugging in a streaming media box into every TV in the house?

I definitely need to make a commitment to getting an apple pencil for his iPad. He currently has a Samsung pencil for a Galaxy Tab S7 FE. But I don't think that is going to have the experience one has with an iPad. That experience is one of finding interesting apps for him to use the pencil with. With the iPad you can use the pencil with Freeform and also with Notes. With the Galaxy S7 it's just one app, Samsung Notes. You kind of have constraints there.

 

[preWarp]

The biggest mistake my father and the public school system made with me was in trying to make me be like everyone else.

Instead school was just a torture chamber where I was continuously made to try and fit in with the other kids and my academic abilities were completely ignored.

They want him to learn Phonics right now and he doesn't even understand the sounds in words. They think of something called phonological awareness which is a smorgasbord of phonics and phonemic awareness each of those topics in turn are subdivided into basic skills but they want to throw at him their thirst to meet curricular criterion.

So about teaching him some basics: I have these flash cards that I had to make myself. They have a single specific picture on the front and a letter and a word on the back. For example, a picture of a cat on the front and the letter C and word "Cat" on the back. The idea is to build vocabulary as in, cat, boy, run, tummy, ice, dog, etc. Then break words into two sounds like duh-Ogg for "dog" or buh-Oi for "boy". He loves my cards. He acts like he loves how it is just a single picture of one thing. Even though he seems to like my cards I can't get him to do more than a few cards at a time. After doing two or three cards he wants to stop and even referred to the process as "work" or "no more work" in his words. He actually knows many of the words I am teaching him. So, he can do the words, won't do very many cards before quitting, and I need him to learn sounds or a word being broken into two sounds.

 

[Outdated]

They want him to learn Phonics right now and he doesn't even understand the sounds in words. They think of something called phonological awareness which is a smorgasbord of phonics and phonemic awareness each of those topics in turn are subdivided into basic skills but they want to throw at him their thirst to meet curricular criterion.

A great many of us have a spoken language processing disorder. For those of us with this problem no amount of practice or training will improve it, our brains are wired differently to most others.

I rely very heavily on body language, facial expressions and lip reading in order to be able to understand what people are saying. I'm a very good communicator in a face to face situation and I can be a bit of a con man. Over the phone it's like I'm half deaf, I only manage to hear every second or third word and I have to either keep asking them to repeat themselves or I just give up and pretend that I heard and hope for the best. Video calls aren't much better, and training videos are completely useless to me because I have to keep replaying bits over and over and struggle to make sense from them.

This is not a deficiency in my hearing, I have far better hearing than most, but for me to understand the spoken word takes extremely high levels of concentration and is very tiring.

Physically show me something and I pick it up very quickly. Give me competent text (it must be to the point and make sense) and I can teach myself.

A difference in learning to read between when I was growing up and today is how we were taught. We didn't have Sesame Street back then, and we weren't taught Ay Bee See. We were taught the sounds for those shapes - At, Buh, Cuh, Duh.

 

[Jumpinbare]

I was also considering simple electronics projects, like illuminating and LED, using conductive paint. You mentioned artwork. I bet you could make some interesting art with painted on conductors and tiny surface mount LEDs - really no different from any other thing with tiny flashing LEDs except you are using conductive paint to do it on a canvas.

You may be using "canvas" figuratively, but just in case, I would advise against trying to use conductive paint on actual canvas or other cloth. paper will work much better. The cloth fibers will tend to make the conductive ink traces a series of broken segments rather than a continuous line as it needs to be in order to actually conduct.

 

[preWarp]

You may be using "canvas" figuratively, but just in case, I would advise against trying to use conductive paint on actual canvas or other cloth. paper will work much better. The cloth fibers will tend to make the conductive ink traces a series of broken segments rather than a continuous line as it needs to be in order to actually conduct.

A mural that makes sound when someone touches a letter.

Bare Conductive touch board is used as a controller. Wires in contact with the paint are routed to the controller. Capacitive touch is detected and interesting sounds are activated.