Do we tell them it may be ASD?

January 11, 2010

Hi guys

Our son was diagnosed with HFA 2 years ago. He is now 5 years old. His cousin

will be 3 years old on 1 March, but we are worried about him. He does not really

talk much apart from echoing parts of things he hears. He never plays with the

other kids and chooses to play away from them by himself. He seems to understand

what is said to him, and will follow instructions when it will benefit him -

like to fetch juice from the fridge. He refuses to potty train. He eats only

certain food and only certain brands of those foods. He has an obsession with

sliding doors and will sit opening and closing doors for hours - literally

hours. He will sit with a toy car for hours, loading small stones in and out of

the car, all the time babbling to himself. If he is interrupted he will throw

massive tantrums.

He was recently diagnosed with far sightedness, and his mom believes that all

his delays are as a result of his poor eyesight. She is convinced now that he

has glasses he will see peoples lips while they talk, and will learn to talk.

His hearing tests were all normal.I have to admit that he seems to be more aware

of things and people around him, but we don't think it is only his sight causing

his problems.

We don't know what to do. We see so much of what we saw in our own son in his

cousins behaviour. Our son has been in a special school for autism for the last

2 years, and we have become friends with many of the families there, so we have

seen many presentations of ASD. Of course we can never be experts on autism, but

we think our nephew (middle of 3 kids) may be affected.

Do we talk to his parents? And what do we say? Or do we wait until a therapist

somewhere hopefully suggests an evaluation? They plan on starting speech therapy

at a conventional speech therapist later this month. But from our own experience

we know that not all therapists consider ASD or know enough about it. We had

several consultations before getting a diagnosis!

Our nephew's mom is not easy to talk to. She can be quite abbrasive at times and

will go for months without talking to anyone who upset her. So we could wait and

see to avoid conflict. But will they not blame us if we saw a problem and did

not say anything?

Our son is doing so well, and will be going to a private remedial school this

year with neurotypical children. (We hope he will be able to cope - school

starts 13 January.)We believe that early intervention made this possible for our

boy. We would like to see our nephew have the same benefits of an early

diagnosis if it should turn out that he has ASD. What do we do? Please help!

Mirinda

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