Zoey the Muppet is sad because her fake father was going to take her somewhere and he couldn’t because he had to work. “Maybe she’d be happier,” my wife Jill snaps, “if he didn’t have a job and she didn’t have food on her table or money to buy her little ballet slippers!” Oh no, says Jill, checking the screen, Zoey doesn’t have her tutu in this one.
“This one” is The Elmo Movie, a video wherein somebody has a problem or series of problems that an 11-year-old like my son should have long since tuned out.
“I’m tired of little toddler rants,” Jill adds. “When your children are nine years old, you’re done with that. I have no patience for Elmo or Zoey or their pain! I sound like a maniac.”
If only. It may be Zoey or Elmo or Thomas or Barney, but kids like my son Alex (PPD-NOS) seem hooked on such TV. In many cases, for a long, long time. (“There he is,” a special needs mom said to us once, showing us a picture of her son. “With his blanket and his cartoons.” At that time, her son was 28.) Just this morning I heard an Asperger’s expert say such obsessions might be “thought blockers,” keeping at bay a world too hard to comprehend. Wish Alex’s blocker would be a quiet one.
Alex has other videos: A 1980s Mother Goose series with what Jill once termed “cast-off” Muppets and that guy who played Otis the Drunk on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Alex also has the Christmas and Halloween Charlie Browns and two episodes of Arthur.
But Elmo videos return over and over to hammer us: Elmo Cooking; Elmo Visits the Firehouse; Elmo’s movie wherein he does laundry. Alex has been watching Elmo since pre-school. Firehouse did get Alex to hold a piece of bread (though not bite it) and drink a glass of milk just like the firemen. Now he also wants to dart into every coin-op laundry he passes, and wants to spell “Laundromat” in Scrabble letters. Elmo works with big stars, DeNiro-caliber stars. And there are touches of sophistication and education (Firehouse, for instance, is “Sesame Street”’s nod to 9/11).
But God there’s something self-centered about Elmo. It’s all about him, from his scene-stealing to his “world” to his psychopathic use of the third person:
La-la la la, la-la la la Elmo’s world, la-la la la, la-la la la, … Elmo loves his goldfish, his crayons too, thaaaaaat’s Elmo’s world… That’s the song, too, with no grown-up twist like they made up for Barney’s song (“A shot rang out, Barney hit the floor, no more purple dinosaur…”) There are many Elmo-bashing videos on youtube (Let’s Kill Elmo, The Death of Elmo, Elmo Falls Down Stairs). They don’t really satisfy, but be my guest.
Once I took Alex’s plush Elmo when he (Alex) wasn’t looking and clacked its hard plastic eyeballs on the towel rack. Every summer when I visit my brother in Maine, I promise to buy myself an Elmo and take it to a nearby desolate gravel pit, prop it up on the dirt bank and shoot it to pieces with a .22. Is this crazy?
Why don’t you just take the tapes away from him? Don’t you have any control over your kid?! This is the year we move Alex on from Elmo! we’ve proclaimed more times than I can recall, and just yesterday Jill announced “our new Elmo-free living room.” But banishing Elmo always seems to get lost in the fatigue inherent in trying to live anything of your own life while having an autistic child around. Alex sneaks them back. He take them away as punishment; after he’s good, he plays them again. We put certain titles in the closet, he forgets about, plays others.
Lately, though, I’ve seen a difference. When Alex inserts a video now, he rewinds, plays, rewinds. He rewinds up to five minutes of tape, watches, rewinds, watches again and perhaps a third time, and then moves on to the next five minutes of the tape. Almost as if studying a book, which is probably what he’s been taught in his first two months of middle school.
Maybe Alex’s take on Elmo is growing with him, and will naturally fade before age 28. Autistic kids are attending college in record numbers; maybe there’s a doctorate somewhere in Elmo. Maybe I should just move on.
Photo by Juen
More on these topics:
asperger's syndrome, autism, elmo, elmo's world, thought blockers
Kimmie says:
Elmo is a sadistic little f - - -
I am with a man who is 26 and lives with autism. I can attest that he is, and I can attest that he doesn't let it stop him from being successful in life. He is going to WMU for his Masters in Economics, and may even go for his doctorate. I would say it means that even if you or someone else has Autism, you can still do great things in life.
I am no expert though, just an observer, so please don't think I give this advice professionally:
I cannot tell you that every autistic person is the same, but I can tell you that in most cases(That I have seen), they are geniuses. I can also tell you that just sitting down and observing my boyfriend has given me alot of information about him, because I don't get the advantage of oral communication alot of the time. To be honest, most of the communication is movement, and it fascinates me to figure out his likes and dislikes by simply letting his body language say it all.
If you give hyour son other outlets, I am sure you can ween him of the demon spawn for good. I don't know if you have tried Guitar Hero, but that definately does get rapt attention while teaching music (sort of), and hand-eye coordination. Mike plays Megadeath on Expert. I don't know if you know of them, but they are known for extremely difficult riffs and rocking out. Drawing is another good outlet. My friend lets her son, who is also autistic, cook. He's 15 years old and can cook better than Martha Stewart. The point I am trying to make is that you can definately try other things that could a) help him toward being weened off of elmo, b) give him something better to do than to sit and watch sesame street, and c) help him to become successful and get passed the stigma of autism. Find something your son particularly likes to do, watch him for a bit, then encourage him to keep at it. :)
I hope that helps!