I would like to share a strange belief I had as a kid

[Gift2humanity]

Sorry to keep posting.
Up until I was about six I thought adults kept growing and growing.
I remember asking my mum my elderly people weren't really tall, as I expected them to be twice the size of my parents given their age, I did not understand that people stopped growing.
Is this an example of literal autistic thinking?

 

[Kit]

I'm pretty sure lot of kids have strange beliefs.

My son thought teachers lived in their school.

I thought my mom always came to my school and stood at the edge of the playground with binoculars to spy on me because how else would she have known what happened at school. I even thought she had stealth because I never saw her at recess.

 

[tree]

I thought mice decomposed to the point of vanishing entirely after 3 days.
I'd see a dead mouse on the cellar stairs, but it was always gone after three
days. Turned out that was the length of time it took for my mother to notice
there was a dead mouse on the cellar stairs.

 

[Sherlock77]

I know lots of tall elderly people, and at least a few short young people... Yes, I do know that people get shorter as they age, more obvious as they get much older...

I tend to think that children in general are more literal, they haven't developed all their reasoning skills yet, if that's the right word

 

[Hylian]

There were a lot of weird things I believed as a kid, but all of my NT peers believed equally ridiculous things.

Kids have an incomplete understanding of what goes on around them since they've been alive for so little, and like Sherlock77 said they don't have amazing reasoning skills yet, so their logic is weird and they all (NT or autistic) come to conclusions that seem bizarre.

 

[Kit]

When I was little, I thought all the Disney people lived in our Memorial Coliseum because that was where we would go see Disney On Ice. My mom would tell us they were sleeping so they were not doing any shows right now. Yes I thought they were actual people from Disney films instead of professional actors who are professional ice skaters as well.

Then when I was older, I thought it was Disneyland until our parents took us to the actual Disneyland.

 

[SusanLR]

I remember a scary and weird thing when I was about three.
I had a blow up clown toy that was taller than me and you could hit it, but, you couldn't knock
it over. A rolly-polly thing and it had a big red nose that stuck out.

I became so obsessed as to WHY I couldn't knock it over and it always popped back up, that I found
a pair of scissors and cut off the nose so I could look inside.
Of course that caused it to deflate and it sunk into a pile of plastic on the floor.
I thought I had murdered it!
I was scared to death and went into the living room where Mom saw something was wrong as I was
pale and acted sheepish.
I thought I was really in trouble...I'd killed a clown!

 

[Mary Terry]

When I was a kid, I thought I could be an Indian and live off the land when I grew up. One of the greatest disappointments in my life happened when I was in the fourth grade and my mother firmly told me that I could not be an Indian when I grew up because I was a Caucasian.

 

[Gift2humanity]

I know lots of tall elderly people, and at least a few short young people... Yes, I do know that people get shorter as they age, more obvious as they get much older...

I tend to think that children in general are more literal, they haven't developed all their reasoning skills yet, if that's the right word

I was six when I said this, even despite seeing my little nana and average sized Granda plus my other grandparents, I thought 90 year olds must be about 9ft

 

[Nervous Rex]

When I was a kid, my parents told me to eat so I could get big. I asked my mom, "If you're grown up, why do you eat?" She didn't answer me - it was years later that I learned that you also need food for energy and healing.

I took things very literally. At my grandmother's house, a dog that was usually outside was inside. I asked, "Is the dog allowed inside?" My mom said, "Sometimes." I didn't know what "sometimes" was, so I said, "Is it sometimes?" and my mom said, "No." I was so confused.

Once, I fell asleep while we were driving east toward the edge of town. When I woke up, we were still driving east, but were further west of where were before (my parents had driven all over town running errands). I asked if we had driven all the way around the world, and I was disappointed that I missed it.

 

[Streetwise]

I must be different from other autistic people in a didn't create a belief but held onto what I saw on television