Pokemon!

LOL Karen I have three kids all teenagers now and all have been obsessed by Pokemon at one time or another. In fact they all still play the various DS games. My oldest is almost 20 and both he and his RAF buddies play Pokemon interactively. My youngest is almost 15 and was diagnosed with Aspergers when he was about 7/8 years old and he still has all his Pokemon figures and cards and, as you say, knows all about them, their power levels, their special tactical moves etc. He was also the same the dinosaurs before Pokemon came on the scene and still knows all the dinosaurs and their statistics. He is now into matters scientific and has become a Trekkie, being fanatical about Star Trek (and Star Wars). He also had a Thomas the Tank Engine phase when he was a toddler and had all the engines and several different kinds of tracks for them, all the videos and books.

Josie - Community Champion

Hi Karen
My son has never been into Pokemon but from a very early age was absolutely obsessed with Thomas Tank, he has every train you can think of, knows all the names, has different tracks, tons of books, we have Thomas tables, chairs everything in our house. He is only just beginning to grow out of it a bit but we will still have days where we're building train tracks again. He has had sort of mini obsessions like Spongebob and Bob the Builder but they never were as intense as the Thomas one and didn't last near as long.

Tracy - Community Champion

Hi Karen,

We were just chatting in the social thread about how we should start up a discussion about obsessions...We havent had the Pokemon one either here...we have dogs/scooby doo with Josie (from about the age of 4 and she is now 11). We had Dinosaurs, Transformers and now star wars with Jack who is 4 and I have a feeling could eventually go down the Pokemon route! We also had various collections of things with Hollie and also interests in anything scientific (global warming, the creation of the earth) and currently, although she is still very interested in science, she is completely obsessed with anything to do with Vampires.....so quite a range!

One thing that we found helped was not to try and stop it or resrict it as that seemed to have the opposite effect on our kids, but if it got to the point that it was taking over, we would bombard them with their interest (sort of reverse psychology) and it made it seem less desperate to them to loose themselves in their obsession world...sort of taking the power out of it if that makes sense?!....to be honest, Hollie has been through such a hard time recently, I actually think that without her interest and fact gathering, she wouldnt have got through it quite so well!! I never thought Id say this...but I have a lot to thank vampires for! (and I quite like Twighlight and Vampire Diaries myself!)

Claire - Community Champion

Hi,

We cope with my eldest obsessions by making sure he has a leisure time rota... he is not allowed to spend any longer than 1 hr on any activity.. this makes sure he does not spend all day every day on the same thing. He will choose 3 or 4 things and rotate them.. we use a timer to make sure he keeps track of time :)  

Leanne - Community Champion