Little Buddy’s key worker gave me a bag of Clipo and asked me to do some cafe / restaurant role play with him at home, because he apparently did some role playing with her at nursery, serving her food.

Our observations below:

• The experience started with a dining set on the coffee table with the Clipo used as food (a colander with the Clipo in it, various bowls/containers, plastic cup, ladle, wooden spoon, and cutlery).
• With no introduction, Papa played a customer and requested food to be served. However, Little Buddy was not really interested in the role play initially – he was more interested in building stuff with the clipo
• Mama took over and showed him how to serve food to get him more interested. From that point, he became very engaged & enthusiastic as a “restaurant manager”.
• Through this role play, Ao demonstrated the following traits:
  • Relentless: when Ao starts something that he is interested in, he usually gets very engaged. This is no different this time – at the end of each meal, his first word is “again” or “encore” to mean that he wants to repeat the experience. We played the meal scenario 5 times in total, but he could have probably gone on for many more meals;
  • Directive: although Little Buddy tries hard to provide a good service, his natural bossiness makes him quite a strict host: “sit there”, “eat this”, etc. When Papa or Mama requests some water, he even serves the water directly in Papa/Mama’s mouth. Not quite your average restaurant experience…
  • Imaginative: Ao has no problem coming up with his own original scenario, either in response to Papa/Mama’s questions or from his own initiative. He invents some interesting dishes, such as “fish with chocolate sauce”, and drives the different stages of the meal from carefully setting up the cutlery to giving the price and collecting the money.
• Finally, we asked Little Buddy to stop the cafe role-playing and have dinner instead. He refused to initially, but said OK after we agreed to a transitional step: playing with the Clipo (while the kitchen utensils and dishes were cleared away) before having dinner