Thomas the Tank Engine and Toe Walking

My son who falls on the Autism spectrum use to love Thomas the Tank engine and he too walked and ran on his toes. He to this day has “brisk” reflexes and seems able to “contort” himself into many shapes. I think he has physical issues that lead to his behaviors. He has very small hands, big feet but small toes, and big round eyes. His proportions are definetly out of synch and I think this leads to some of his difficulties.

Not sure why so many auties seem to love Thomas the Tank (of course there are a great many neurologically typical children who also love Thomas) but there does seem to be a strong following for this particular show. There is very little chance that it is related to toe-walking however, another common occurance in those on Spectrum.

Best guess on the toe-walking is that it is tied into the gut issues many au kids have. Probably as any as half the current crop of autistic kids have complex gut infections and suffer from some degree of leaky gut syndrome. Some parents have found their children had various stages of fecal impaction, and when they addressed this problem the toe-walking diminished. Others have reported that it diminishes when they put their children on a strict gfcf diet, or use specific dietary enzymes to aid in the digestion of proteins. For some a good OT program which integrates the sensory input system can help.

Do you find that the toe-walking is problematic? If your child is verbal, have you asked him why he does this? Most people run on their toes (try running flat footed, it is a teeth rattling experience), and perhaps it is just a more comfortable way ofwalking for the child.

Toe walking should not continue after age 18 months from what I have read. My dyslexic son toe walks and runs. I took him to a specialist and he said it was due to short heel cords and sent us to a physiotherapist who we saw 3 or 4 times, at 10 day intervals. She massaged the muscles and tendons in the back of the legs and showed us how to do exercises to lengthen the cords. One of the exercises was to take a tower with the ends in each hand and place the ball of the foot in the folded part and pull towards the chest. Another was to put the ball of both feet on a thick book with the heels stretching to touch the floor.
It is important to stretch the heel cords and constantly remind the child to walk on his heels. If the heel cords don’t stretch, surgery may be required. Failure to correct the problem could result in back problems (child curves the back in order to maintain a center of balance) and flat footedness which can cause very painful foot problems later.
I never got a very good explanation why an 8 year old would still be toe walking. The doctor said it likely started as a bad habit, which resulted in shortened heel cords. THe Therapist said it may well have started due to poor balance (he still can’t ride a bike).
The good news is he rarely walks on his toes now, 6 months after treatment.

Although my son is n’t autistic (he has been noted to be “aspergian” in some ways) I’ve decided all of these disorders and LD’s are related. How else to explain the fact that so many of these kids do the same things? My son still toe walks at age 8 (although not exclusively) and used to love Thomas. We carried a Terence the tractor all around Cape Cod one summer. Or is it just a boy thing?
The toe walking was considered a red flag when he was 4 which led to him doing OT for a while . My father in law was concerned at that time b/c he said (and he’s a MD) that toe walking could be a sign of cerebral palsy. My pediatrician said it was a neurological warning sign ….

When my son played with his Thomas trains he used to use the wooden tracks to create these incredibly elaborate patterns. We thought he was deeply intelligent, probably was an early sign of his social disabilitiy or something. : )(LOL)

Cerebral palsy is one other disability I thought of too. Of course it is because I take care of a multitude of babies,a lot with cerbral palsy. I too have heard the connection in regards to the “spectrum” and it very well can be neurological. BUT scientificly speaking,if the child spends all his time on his toes,his heel cords will tighten. His achilles to be specific.Tendons connection bone to Bone,and ligaments connect muscle to bone. They are very much like rubber bands. If they walk on their toes for an extended length of time these”rubber bands” don’t get stretched,if they aren’t stretched they shorten. if the child grows and theses rubber bands are not stretched the bones grow anyway,when the bones grow the rubber bands start stretching the another way. At this point surgical repair would be necessary. BUT,the interesting thing is,if it is neurologically based,after surgery,the tendons will eventually will do the very same thing again,unless PT is used ongoing. Curiously autistic kids don’t usually need this,while CP kids do.Hmmm. Haven’t seen a heck of a lot of autistic kids in for TAL’s. Tendon Achille’s lengthening. Have seen a heck of a lot of CP kids having it done more then once. Being a nurse,and a little knowledge is a terrible thing,my oldest,32 weeker,walked on his toes for a brief period in time. I immediately took him into the pedi. who told me,while my ADHHHHD toddler was tearing up his exam room,that he honestly thought he was trying to see over the counter tops or things that were just out of reach. He suggested shoes that had wieghted soles. It worked,either the shoes or he finally grew taller. The hyperactivity continued…..

I wonder if you are describing obssesive interests and not specificly Tommy the Tank interest?Obsessive tendencies are a symptom of Austitic spectrum. And the obssesive interests can be anything. BTW making elaborate tracks, CAN be a sign of intelligence!

AND,BTW,my oldest tends to have interests that keep him hyperfocused on for an extended length of time,then he moves on to another. Currently we are into skateboarding. The need to see,and look, be there quicker,can all be signs of giftedness,or ADHD. Just to throw a few more diagnosis’s at you:-)

I just finished reading Tony Attwood’s book on Asperger’s Syndrome. He addresses the Thomas the Tank Engine thing saying that it’s “understandable considering the child’s fascination with order, predictability, consistency and symmetry. The carriages must be arranged in a line and a train can only travel along the predetermined track. The parallel railway lines and sleepers are appealing due to their symmetry and regularity.” I thought this made a lot of sense. Also, I just attended a workshop on Autism and “toe walking” came up. The person who gave the workshop said many kids do it because they’re looking for sensory stimulation.

Re: toe walking

The first thing I thought of was sensory integration. If you read the book “Your out of sync child”, it discusses this as well as many other sensory issues.

That is so funny! My son particularly liked Gordon for some reason, we must have had about 10 of him alone (small, large, die-cast, Brio…). We think it was because Gordon was big and strong and not afraid of anything — wish fulfillment of sorts. My son clearly preferred Ringo Starr to George Carlin, even though I would have thought that the British accent would have thrown him off. (I went back and watched recently, and to my surprise, Ringo enunciates much better, a mystery solved.)
Once, when my son was about three, I found around 30 or so different engines taped to our dining room table in the most amazing diagonal pattern. Every part of his design was in some different diagonal direction, and each with a different angle. The trains pointed northwest, the tape was slightly east of due north, and the lines (2 of them —a big train line and a little one) were swooshed across the the table to the east southeast. I’ve never seen anything like it! There were color and size patterns there, too, extremely subtle. Probably things that I didn’t catch, like personality (of the trains) patterns.
I’m convinced that there is a gifted component in there somewhere, and it sounds like it’s there in your son, too.
My son is doing very well now, hasn’t toe-walked for years (OT therapy), and is doing very well in a private school for kids with LD’s, thanks to the McKay scholarship. The more “normal” he seems, the more I privately wonder that we’re fixing something that was never broken, just different, fascinating and incomprehensible. Of course the “TiredMom” part of me wants a child that’s easy, as if there is such a thing.
Thanks for the input from everbody. Somebody ought to do a comprehensive history on these children. The statistical analysis would be amazing!

Just to make a reference back to another thread (“I could scream..”) of course being LD doesn’t preclude these kids from being gifted - and maybe gifted in ways that aren’t captured by an IQ test. The intensity my son brings to his interests is what will certainly yield a brilliant scientific discovery someday - assuming he learns to read ! : )

It would be interesting to keep track of these kids, and see where they end up in life compared to their “normal” counterparts.

Tired Mom- we too worried for a few years we were fixing something that wasn’t broken, but when the academic problems became apparent than what choice do we have? BTW, I laughed out loud about your Gordon train. To this day I have 2 of every train (die cast and Brio) just in case we ever lost one. My husband was convinced Thomas was really a religious cult in disguise - with Sir Topham hat as god. Oh , those were the days - endless hours of train tracks, and not knowing what was in store for us…

A friend of mine’s 7yr old who was most recently dxed bipolar had a tremendous obsession with Thomas as well as trains in general. He had several different kinds of train sets as well as the videos, his parents even took him to PA to ride the old trains there. This was before he was school age. He was also found to have a genuis level IQ. Don’t remember if he was a toe walker though, it’s been a while since we were in the states.

Yes, in Aspergers or high functioning autistic children. I had one who was totally obesessed with Thomas. Your son probably fits “on the spectrum” as they like to say.

Ann,
Thank you for this information!!!! I’m going to try some of the exercises you’ve described here. If there are any more please share them!

By the way, my son was not obsessive about Thomas as a Toddler. Oddly, and this is going to sound very strange….he was obsessed with drainage/or underground sewer pipes. He would count the drainage openings in the streets and point them out whever we passed by them in a car. He liked to stand nearby and study them (he also was very interested in sprinkers and pipes!). Once I found him a book about what’s under the ground (in a city) and he was quite absorbed with it.

Wow,this IS interesting:-) what about some of the other shows? Blue’s clue’s,Barney? does it mention these at all?

It truely does seem like a cult!

Glad to hear another McKay sucess story.:-)

My son’s older and missed the Thomas the Tank Engine” phenomenon. His was “Jeopardy”. At first my husband and I coudn’t figure out why our son was compelled to watch “Jeopardy” every day. He was two and a half years old at the time. All he paid attention to were the scores. As contestants would get an answer right, my son would shout out their new scores before they registered on their boxes. “Jeopardy” was the highlight of his day.

Somewhere around the same time, he was introduced to Duplo blocks and then later, the standard Legos. To this day (he’s 22) he’s obsessed by Legos. His toys were always building toys and he always built them perfectly symmetrical. He continues to receive Legos (Mindstorms) as gifts and he’s taken a college course on building robots with them.

He was a toe walker when young. He was also very awkward physically - never ran right. Despite being a toe walker, when he ran, he ran almost flatfooted, landing hard on his heels. He didn’t look people in the eye till he was about 12. I thought it was shyness.

He didn’t learn to read more than 3 letter phonetic words till he was nearly 10. Reading is still a slow job for him but he has an incredible memory. He thinks in vivid pictures and never forgets anything he’s read. He’s never had to memorize anything for school because after a single (but very slow) reading, he’s got it fully memorized.

If he had been a student of mine, now that I know what I know, I’d have made sure he got LIPS training and sensory integration therapy - I wish I knew about all of this when he was young.

He was a math wizard as a kid. At the age of 13, he was the youngest CNA (computer netware administrator) ever certified by Novell and is now a computer science major at an Ivy League university. Lately he’s taken to drawing- very symmetrical drawings of course and never of human faces.

I’m certain now that he falls on the autistic spectrum. I used to worry about him when he was a child because he seemed so shy. I don’t worry anymore. He’s had his share of girlfriends, has a wonderful steady girlfriend now and a group of loyal friends who are all very similar to himself. I found that the hardest years for him were elemenatry through middle school because once he got to high school, his talents were recognized and celebrated.

I think we all worry so much about our kids when they’re young and struggling through school but it’s important to remember that some of these perceived weaknesses end up being their greatest strengths later on. I firmly believe it’s our school systems that have it all wrong because often what’s celebrated as strengths in school are meaningless later in life. My son’s tenacity and hyperfocus are much admired strengths now.

That was a lovely posting, Joan. Encouraging to hear. Coming from a public service family with lots of teachers, I wince at criticisms of the public school system, but with the exception of a few rare gems, they are completely unequipped to deal with exceptional children. They try, but they really have dropped the ball with my son. Congratulations to your wonderful son!

Thank you for sharing this wonderful story - its inspirational . It sounds like your son learned to use his gifts to compensate for his areas of weakness - something we all must do. And you must have done a great job of supporting him even without all the information we have about these kids today.