Love for swings and the formation of the “wait” skill.

Alice loves the swing. This love for her was manifested even when she could not even sit on them on her own. We would come to the Playground, I would sit on the swing, put Alice on my lap, and we would swing. It was difficult to get her out of there, and she had to be persuaded. One day, I decided to check how much it will last, the benefit of the day was cloudy and the site was empty. I think we’ll rock until she gets bored. I marked the time and prepared to wait. An hour later, I began to think that perhaps the idea of the experiment was not so good. I don’t know what made me go on, but we kept rocking and rocking. I did not wait for her to finish this exciting event, but after 1 hour and 40 minutes, we still left the swing. This time, however, we did not have to persuade her, we left quietly.
I didn’t know at the time, but it turned out that many children with autism spectrum disorder have a love of swinging. Of course, this does not mean that if a child likes to swing, then he is necessarily autistic, this is just one of the features in the whole complex of symptoms. Using the love of swinging on a swing in a child as a method of diagnosing the disorder is incorrect, only a comprehensive examination can give an answer whether the child has autistic traits or not.
In our case, this love played into the hands of the formation of such an important skill as waiting. If in Surgut, where we lived, there were a lot of playgrounds and each of them had a swing (2-3 pieces per site), then in Anapa they were tight. No, there are just a lot of playgrounds, but none of them that are located in our yard have swings. We were lucky, in walking distance from the kindergarten where Alice goes last year we reorganized the square and there were two modern playgrounds with five swings! Now, after kindergarten, we always go to one of the playgrounds and Alice swings on the swing. Since there is a school nearby and just at this time the lessons of the first shift end and begin at the second one, there are many younger students on the sites. Swings are popular with many people.
Earlier, Alice went to the Playground and went straight to the cherished swing. She didn’t care if someone was swinging at them or not, she could safely go straight to the swinging child. There was no fear of being hit at all. She didn’t correlate the swing movement with her location. Perhaps there was also a sensory disturbance, the difficulty of understanding your body and its place in space. I had to pull it away so it wouldn’t get hit. In addition, she wanted to sit on the swing immediately, even though it was occupied by another child. She may have been trying to approach a moving swing. So I started teaching her the “wait” skill. First you had to hold it by force, repeat “wait”, then just hold it so that it does not jerk, now it is quite calmly waiting for its turn. Moreover, she can go to another carousel while her favorite one is busy, but she will constantly look and see if there is a vacant seat. This very important skill “wait” is now transferred to other life situations, which makes me very happy.