Honoring Tribal Legacies

Some authors have suggested that the symbolic play deficit in ASD is due to children’s difficulty generating play ideas (a performance deficit), rather than difficulty comprehending symbolic pretend (a competence aspect), when adults provide them with supportive scaffolding and ideas. Are the differences noted in the pretend play of children with ASD an issue of competence (they don’t possess pretend qualities in their play) or performance (they understand pretend play and can engage in it but they rarely do) (Kasari et al., 2013)? Yet even though they do somewhat better in scaffolded play, children with ASD still exhibit significant play deficits in both spontaneous and scaffolded play, indicating their play deficits are in both competence and performance; the play deficit is not limited to problems with generativity (Rutherford et al., 2007).