Responsiveness in asd children...

[mysonben]

Hi, yet another question for you ladies.

DS will be 4 in november, and has mild asd.
When he was a young tot, he often took ages to respond to our voice talking to him, sometimes he'd turn towards us but din't come quick, we used to put it down to "selective hearing" and him been a bit difficult.

I mean up until a few months ago, we'd have to repeat his name several times or go and shake him a bit to get his attention (probably why they thought he had hearing problems at nursery). His attention span was also very short.

But lately he has improved dramatically, most of the time he will respond to us straight away or at the very least will look at us.
It is becoming rare for us to have to repeat his name several times, i'm not saying he alays wants to comply with the request though!!! That's a different matter all together

IS it usual for asd children to eventually gain fairly good responsiveness to verbal calls???
I thought that general unresponsiveness was a prime symptom of asd.
Can that change within a short period of time?

I must add my ds 'speech has also improved a lot over the last few months, so the two progress are probably related.

Thanks for reading.

[Phoenix4725]

hmm my ds still now at 4 doe snot always responds to his name sometimes you have to go touch him.But of all the dx he does have they rulled out asd

[cyberseraphim]

Yes quite usual - Most ASD children are later than average to respond to name but will respond when delayed development reaches that point. DS1 is great for turning to make eye contact when name is called now but was oblivious when younger. DS1 was about 4 when he started responding. DS2 (NT) It seems as if he has always known his name !

[sadminster]

My ds has started responding about 50% of the time (even if just a pause in what he's doing), 6 weeks ago he never responded - I'm hoping we eventually get to the point that he'll actually come when we call.

[mysonben]

Thanks.
That's it, when i see how dd (16m and NT) respond to her name it's amazing really, from the age of around 9 or 10 m, we have seen how well she knows her name, when she started walking would get up and go to the bottom of the stairs when i said out loud to ds "time for bed"

DS on the other hand would just ingnore the calls really, we'd have to go and get him or touch him, or clap our hands for him to respond.

It's only been recently like about 2-3 months that he is now responding quite well at home, i mean 8 times out of 10. I'm very pleased with that!

But his response level drops dramatically when he's at nursery, or if there is a large group of people around him, or if we are out in town,... generally the calmer the environement the better he responds.
When it's busy and noisy it's almost like he can't hear us, plus he become very hyper, i think he gets overloaded.

[jasdox]

ds 4 in nov too, has been more often then not good at responding acknowledging then carry's on with what he is doing, or do some posturing, then gets distracted and does something else, eventually third time lucky he responds .