When Leo was 2, after he had mastered words like no and cat, he began saying “Akamahn!” The word baffled me and my husband, Karl. What was our son trying to tell us? He said it with such frequency—Akamahn! Akamahn!—it was as if he were summoning a god. Only after I heard our apartment’s maintenance man in the hallway did I put it together: vacuum.

Leo’s fascination was, it turned out, not with the gods but with the suction power of a Dyson—or, more generally, anything brought to life by energy. Once I figured that out, I spent hours with him, carrying around a desk lamp from outlet to outlet throughout our apartment lobby. Each time the light came on, it illuminated his ecstatic face, and often a slender thread of spittle that hung from his mouth. After Karl came home with a bag of extension cords, Leo linked them together and proceeded to wrap our lobby in one uninterrupted cord like a Christo installation.

One muggy summer day, after we’d been kicked out of the lobby, we stopped by a neighborhood consignment shop. The owner had set up a battalion of oscillating fans on just about every available surface. Leaning over a table to get a closer look at, say, a set of linen tea towels meant holding back hair, necklaces, fingers, to avoid the high-speed blades. Leo, though, was fearless, running laps, hands first, around the store. “Dat one!” he’d say with a wildness usually reserved for picking flavors of ice cream. “Dat one!”

Related Stories

Within a matter of weeks, Leo was imploring me to visit the fan sections in other stores—Best Buy, Goodwill, the seasonal aisle at CVS. If parenting is an exercise in patience, these outings were the Ironman. Some days, I’ll admit, especially when the weather was cool, I’d tell him that all the fans were packed up for the season, so I could avoid seeing the same aproned guy, day after day, at Ace Hardware.

Then Leo took to the crayons, and out poured landscapes of blades and switches and tangled cords. After a few months of drawing, he announced, “I want to be a manager of a fan store when I grow up.” Karl and I took him to a place called Dan’s Fan City so he could get a glimpse of what his future held. “His mind is about to be blown,” Karl said.

The manager, who was not Dan, told me that his most frequent visitors are boys under the age of 10. “There’s one that comes in every Sunday just to look around.” Here I was, thinking that Leo was the only unicorn. Not-Dan’s impassive reaction to one more fan boy stomped on any notion that our son was unique.

It is a parent’s job to think her children are exceptional. Up to this point, I had spent many hours crafting a tale for myself that Leo’s fascination with fans was, in fact, proof of his genius. Now I was imagining a roomful of Leos, all in tiny white lab coats, all saving the world one vactrain at a time. Their origin stories were the same: “It all started,” they would say, “with the Lasko Wind Machine.”

Leo Feldman, yellow period, age 4.

Beth Holzer

After that, we entered phase two of Leo’s fan obsession. When you type “fans” into the YouTube search, you can find a virtual world of toddlers showing off their magnificent collections—box fans, window fans, fans attached to squirt bottles, fans with blades that look like some combination of Mickey Mouse and Edward Scissorhands. “This one’s the O2 Cool,” says Caleb, whose most popular video has racked up close to a million views. (Admittedly, Leo probably now accounts for 50,000 of them.) In a video called “The First Start-Ups of Fan Season,” another kid spends 22 minutes wordlessly switching on every fan in his house.

These days, for a good hour, I often let Leo, who is now 6, watch video after YouTube video. (What else can I do? Nothing else captivates him like this.) The videos explain everything from quantum mechanics (Minutephysics) to, um, how to build fans (big shout-out here to Navin Khambhala’s channel, Mr. NK). It’s that DIY category that now interests Leo most. “How to make electric fans,” he says into our voice-activated remote. Aside from showcasing a proliferation of bandaged thumbs and index fingers, most of the clips that he watches involve making a spinning device out of plastic water bottles and black and red wires.

When we ask Leo why he loves fans so much, he says, “I don’t know. I just do.” Often, when Karl gets home from work, Leo presents a blueprint of his own Rube Goldberg design, and the two of them sit down and discuss.

Some days, when I sit next to Leo and try to read or catch up on emails and ignore the repetitive (and weirdly identical) fan boy background music, I feel guilty that I’m not exactly interacting with my son. But I also know that when I drop him off each day at school, he isn’t learning how to make an auto-feed soldering iron in any of his activity centers. And then I feel grateful to YouTube.

For every Steve Wozniak, there is a Leo Feldman waiting in the wings. But the thing is, what if having the gift of a beautiful mind, so to speak, is also a booby prize? Ever since he could formulate a sentence, Leo has been struggling to find common ground among his peers. (To be fair, it’s the rare 6-year-old who wants to discuss the finer points of cooling systems.) He much prefers to keep company with grown-ups. Take the retired scientist we met the other day at the flea market: For the better part of an hour, Leo and the PhD yukked it up over, among other things, mercury poisoning in the Himalayas.

Karl and I took Leo to a place called Dan’s Fan City so he could get a glimpse of what his future held.

Because Leo’s interests are foreign to many kids his own age, I worry. As much as I want him to be unconventional, I also want him to be happy. Leo is still refreshingly secure enough to think everyone is his friend, but I’m waiting for him to find someone who really gets him. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time feeling like an outsider—picked on for being too tall, wearing the wrong brand of jeans. I want for Leo what I most wanted back then: to be accepted.

I went searching for ­people who would give me some proof that all this was possible. Eventually I found Dan Anderson, a University of Massachusetts professor emeritus in the department of psychological and brain sciences and coauthor of a forthcoming paper entitled “Little Engineers.”

In his research, Anderson and his team had found that showing even very young children programs about construction prompts healthy behaviors in play after the kids see them, and that well-designed TV content may encourage kids to become, of course, little engineers.

Before our call, I sat down and wrote a few paragraphs to Anderson about Leo’s “absolute obsession with all things fans.” When we got on the phone, Anderson sounded hesitant. “Is now a good time?” I asked. It was, he answered, but he had something to tell me first. “I’m not sure how you’ll receive this,” he began. “When I first read your email,” he said, “the first thing that came to mind was Asperger’s.” Being fixated on things that spin, he explained, is a big giveaway.

With his words, the potential meaning of Leo’s obsession had changed again. Now he wasn’t a quirky prodigy or an electrical engineer in training; he was a diagnosis. I am the sort of person who is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, the sort of parent who fears—as I think all parents do, sometimes—that my child’s smooth and untroubled exterior may conceal a riptide. This fear of mine triggers its own Rube Goldberg machine. The sensible part of me—the part that trusts Leo will make friends, that the world will appreciate his way of being—became briefly lost in marbles and hamster wheels.

Leo Feldman, blue period, age 5.

Beth Holzer

I thought back to a day in the fall of 2014, when Karl and I were at Leo’s school, wedged on tiny chairs, in front of his pre-K teacher, a fresh-scrubbed twentysomething in the habit of wearing her hair in messy buns. It was our first parent-­teacher conference. Next to the teacher sat an unfamiliar woman—there, we were told, in case we decided to have Leo evaluated. “For what?” I remember Karl asking. Leo was sitting in the corner of the classroom, busying himself with Magna-Tiles.

“Leo likes spinning,” his teacher noted. “In class, on the playground, when we’re in circle time.” I knew what was coming. We were about to be told that Leo might be on the autism spectrum.

“He’s bored and burning off energy,” said Karl, who was completely unfazed.

I sat silently, trying to keep my hands from shaking. Leo kept right on slapping Magna-­Tiles together.

When Leo was a baby, I avoided reading anything that had to do with developmental milestones. But there was one marker I knew well: Many children show signs of autism by the age of 2. At that moment, Leo was 3; I thought we’d already sailed into port, I thought we were in the clear.

DISCUSSION

Join Parenting In a WIRED World, a new Facebook Group for parents to discuss kids’ health and their relationship to tech.

Karl kept course, telling the woman that in no way did he want his son labeled, his name on a folder, filed in the “different” drawer.

Then Leo walked up to the table where we were sitting. “Look what I made,” he said, placing his creation in front of his teacher and looking her directly in the eye. “It’s a laptop.” In one of the classroom’s activity buckets, he had even found a shoelace to make a faux power cord.

I repeated this story to Anderson. “What if he just likes to build things?” I asked.

“Is he interested in anything else?”

“He’s still doing ballet,” I said, adding that Leo’s ability to spin without getting dizzy is a boon. “And he takes tae kwon do every Tuesday after school.” There was also his profitable (at least in our building) pencil sharpening business. Plus, through sheer gumption and the rap of a used car salesman, Leo had amassed a tidy purse by setting up shop in our lobby, offering his John Derian–like collages for $3 apiece. I thought about a physics professor named Tim Koeth. Not long ago I wrote a (profile about him), chronicling his and his undergrads’ efforts to build a particle accelerator for fundamental physics research, remarkable because so few exist outside of places like CERN. He told me that when he was 2, he asked his parents for a circuit breaker panel for his birthday. When he turned 10, he laid out plans to build a nuclear reactor in his parents’ New Jersey basement. Dan Anderson volunteered his own story: Before taking the college psychology class that would change the course of his life, he wanted to be a forest ranger. “Who’s to say what’s normal?” I asked him, but really I was asking myself.

Still, I found consolation in the uncertainty. After talking to Anderson, I remembered that Leo’s current obsessions might have nothing or everything to do with his future self, and that trying to connect the dots was a pretty useless endeavor.

At the present moment, my son is building a metal-token-­dispensing machine (asking price: $100) and something he’s calling the Forever Boom, a Run DMC ’80s-style portable radio the size of a footlocker. Maybe Leo will go into the music industry, living out his dreams behind a mixing console, a knob- (not fan-) twirling Jimmy Iovine. Or maybe he’ll open a fan store.


Cathy Alter (@cathyalter) is a writer who lives in Washington, DC.

This article appears in the August issue. Subscribe now.


More Great WIRED Stories