My son and daughter are interesting – they spend most of their time together, “playing stories,” by which they mean making up stories based on events and characters from their favorite movies or TV shows, usually with their favorite story themes and their own personalities. So they’ll start with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee fighting Megatron and Arachnia, only they’ve seen Peter Pan recently, so Megatron is starting to act a little like Captain Hook, and Bumblebee is actually Baby Bumblebee, because Daughter loves babies.
See, Son is 8 and high-functioning autistic, otherwise a sweet, intelligent, imaginative boy. Daughter is 6, smart as a whip, socially adept, and bossy as all get out. She bosses Son during their games, which gets one of three responses: (a) he goes along with her script changes; (b) he ignores her entirely; © he accuses her of “not playing it right.” So when Daughter tells Son that not only is Bumblebee a baby, so are Megatron and Optimus, maybe he’ll do it, maybe he won’t, and maybe he’ll point out that for the past hour Megatron and Optimus have been daddies, and she can’t have it both ways.
She responds to (b) either by going along, or by accusing him of “not playing it right,” “not playing fair,” or just bursting into tears – a big favorite at home, though she’s got other tools in school; she just knows what has always pushed the buttons well. She responds to © in much the same way, with the added options of reasonably pointing out why her way is better – reasonably to a six-year-old girl, that is, which seldom cuts ice with an eight-year-old boy. If she tells him that Baby Optimus can fly, for example, he may accept that this is cool enough to change the story, or he may argue “no, he can’t,” or he may go with (b) again, which he’s really good at – if an autistic child doesn’t want you in the room, you are NOT IN THE ROOM – and which drives her absolutely nuts, and really ratchets up the emotional response, and usually gets Dad involved.
He has enormous leverage in this game, as she wants to play with him much more desperately than he wants to play with her (more autism), but more importantly, he’s the one who can do the voices and sound effects, which she thinks is AWESOME, and make props out of Legos and Tinkertoys, which she also thinks is AWESOME. Well, she thinks they’re “super smart,” but will no doubt start calling things AWESOME soon, and Son’s abilities will surely be on the list.