To feel I should point out to a mum that her daughter is clearly on the autistic spectrum?

[StaM]

I run a Brownies group.

An eight year old girl joined us in March. From the very class, i knew she was 'different' from the other girls. She displayed many of the traits my daughter has (who has a diagnosis of ASD - high functioning).

After a few weeks, I talked to the other Leader and she agreed the girl was different but said nothing more of it.

Over the months, volunteers have changed and I'm the only original Leader remaining since the girl started. I've been biting my tongue to say something to the mum, as i obviously didn't want to cause upset/offence. But I've noticed the little girl is seriously struggling socially, and it's not nice to watch.

She acts rather 'pompous; around the other girls. Very grown up, uses large words etc. She doesn't see that she is boring them, or that they are desperate for her to be quiet. The girl will not sit with the others, and opts to sit at the side/in the background. It's seriously like watching my own daughter, and my heart breaks each class for her. She seems really on edge when asked to do a group activity, or anything which involves mixing with the other girls.

I honestly think she could be doing with some assistance/help in social skills like my daughter is receiving. I have an urge every week to take her mum aside at hometime and ask her about her daughter's difficulties, but I don't think her mum would appreciate it.

I've tried talking to the new leader about it, but she's quite old fashioned and doesn't 'believe' in autism ( didn't say this as such though as she knew it would offend me). She basically said 'nothing is on the girl's medical/form, so there's nothing we can do'.

I understand the school would have picked up on this, but as far as i can see, the little girl isn't getting any more relaxed. So I'm not sure whether or not she's already getting help. She definitely needs social skills help. I try and get her to join in, or go and chat with her when she's sitting aside, but she's not interested.

Sorry for the rambling. Just looking for advice. Should I let it be, or should I say something to her mum?

quirrelquarrel I wouldn't be offended, I'd be exasperated. Your opinion is coloured by your experience, as is mine.

If I send my child to Brownies I expect art and crafts, and jolly fun, and a heads up if my child is acting out.

I do not expect the leader to act like some kind of quack, or start discussing with others 'higher up the chain', any medical conditions they imagine my child might have.

That's interesting, RainbowSpiral. Having looked into it, my hunch is that I was/am similar. I could have done most of the things the OP mentions with regard to this girl (all except the rearranging the table, I don't have that set of traits at all). I do suspect I would have benefitted from stuff like Anna mentions - quiet space to be alone sometimes etc. But eventually, to be honest, I just grew out of it, did a lot of developmental catching up. Although I'll never be an extrovert I present as entirely NT now, and I can't imagine it's that far from the truth.

I haven't read all the posts, but my son was diagnosed with HFA last year and it was only after a couple of other parents were kind enough to take us aside and ask if we had had him assessed for autism that we realised that there might be an explanation for all the difficulties he was having. We just thought he was a bit quirky and inexplicably badly behaved on occasions. He was our first child, so we didn't really know what was normal. We read a book about AS and it all clicked - so much of his behaviour suddenly made sense, even down to watching the TV standing on his head!

It was also really helpful when we took him to be assessed, because we could quote the other people who had noticed his issues - we didn't feel that it was just us being paranoid, IYSWIM. If I was this girl's Mum I would be grateful that you were concerned enough to bring it to my attention TBH.

No you should not raise this with the parents. You are not qualified to do so. If she was clearly on the autistic spectrum then it's just possible a member of the medical or teaching profession or indeed the mother herself - might have noticed it before now. Even if they haven't it's still not your place to become involved. You're a brownie leader - and a very kind and thoughtful one by the sound of it.

It's entirely possible that is just a highly intelligent and articulate girl who's very shy.

Yes indeed TwitchyTail. And it isn't just an issue for the parents.

Brownies, Guides, Cubs etc. provide something important for the more socially 'gauche' child.

At school, they may be the child with 'X'.

But at Brownies, for 90 minutes a week, they get to try their hand a just being them. Without the label, or the watchful eyes, or targets to be met, or TAs 'just to help them along'.

It's a chance to screw up, try things out, and start again next week, and to grow into themselves in their own time.

And to see that being just the way they are is fine. And will have to be fine, as they grow up and enter the big wide world.

It really isn't helpful to have unqualified people desperately trying to put them back into their allocated box.

I think the OPs Brownie leader sounds far more accepting of differences than the OP.

OP, how lovely to hear that your DD is receiving good support

I agree with all those who have advised you to tread very carefully - it is a really tricky area.
I work with children who aren't coping in school, and we get quite a lot of children with undiagnosed SN's - mainly AS. In some cases the parents are in denial about the problems and are not ready to accept that their child may need to be assessed. Even as a specialist support service, we have to be extremely careful about the way in which we approach talking to the parents about the child's difficulties.

Her mother may or may not be aware that her child is behaving in this way. She may think that her DD's behaviour is perfectly normal, or may have some form of diagnosis, or be somewhere inbetween.

Do you ever have events where parents are invited so that she could observe her child's behaviour in a large group setting?

Obi, I think you made a good point.

I don't know why people are using such emotive language about the OP recognising a difficulty in a child and wondering whether to raise it with her parents. She doesn't come across as at all "desperate" to put the child in an "allocated box".

There have been lots of threads on MN started by people who are wondering whether to raise similar subjects with friends about their DCs. They don't seem to be accused of acting "like some kind of quack" or "wetting themselves with the excitement" of spotting it.

I don't see why the child's experience at Brownies needs to change one bit if the OP talks to the parent.

Why is it OK for a member of the teaching profession to raise a concern, but not a Brownie leader?

But at Brownies, for 90 minutes a week, they get to try their hand a just being them. Without the label, or the watchful eyes, or targets to be met, or TAs 'just to help them along'.
It's a chance to screw up, try things out, and start again next week, and to grow into themselves in their own time.
And to see that being just the way they are is fine. And will have to be fine, as they grow up and enter the big wide world.

Really? No offence but it just sounds like idealised dreamery to me, I had problems at Brownies, it was a lot like at school. We did have targets to meet, jobs to do, lot of teamwork to do, and like school I was sometimes popular and mostly not. It's the same kids from school-whether or not they actually go to school, it's just another hour of school minus the maths, science, english.

quirrelquarrel, I agree with that point.

OP - as with everyone on here - you can't point out to the mother that her daughter has ASD, since you don't know that. However, you can raise the girl's behavioural difficulties with the mother, to ask if there is a way you can support the girl better: for example, perhaps by providing an alternative quiet activity if you're going to have loud music playing, or giving the girl specific tasks to do when there's free-form unstructured "party" type stuff, where the girl may feel she doesn't have anything "to do".

I generally had no problems in structured activities - it was when I was expected to interact with the other kids during time off that I really had absolutely no idea.

To those saying "leave her alone, she's probably just bright" or "she's probably just shy" - if you had any idea what a prison ASD creates for the poor bastards stuck inside it, you might just begin to understand why all the aspies on this thread are saying "yes, do something, I wish someone had done something similar for me"

It takes 13 years to train as a psychiatrist (5 years for a medical degree, two years junior doctor then 6 years to train as a psychiatrist) so I don't think just anyone should go around diagnosing DC's regardless of how much experience they have. I do think it is ok to say that you are concerned that the girl is not mixing that well withthe other DCs and ask iftheywere mother has any advice for what you can do to help her. Nothing more.

ObiWan - "accepting of difference" and providing help to people who need it are two very different things. Much of the point of Brownies is to provide structured activities leading to personal development (or however you want to describe it - the point isn't that they specifically learn whatever activity it is this week, it's that they learn to interact with each other productively) - and this girl really needs extra assistance with the personal development bit.

If people had recognised that in my life, I might not have been suicidally depressed for much of my adult life, I might not have had 3 successive extremely abusive relationships, I might still have a career.

As it is, all anyone ever said to me was that I was exceptionally intelligent and talented, so I was a pompous little arse, then a self-absorbed pompous little medical student at Cambridge, a pompous little PhD student at Oxford, and a self-important surgical trainee with lots of scientific kudos... until I had a breakdown and quit and moved to New Zealand, where i'm now unemployed, have left my long-term partner, and suicidal. A bit of recognition of ASD when I was 8 would have gone a long way.

anna - you raise an issue which anyone who lives with anyone with ASD will recognise, and i thank you for raising it.

the biggest problem with anyone with ASD is self esteem. Even now, DS is 20, studying a computer science degree, the uni are so impressed with him they have said they would employ him as an academic next year and that will fund his masters....

his self esteem is not great. It was picked up at diagnosis when he was 8, they constantly feel a failure because they simply cannot fit in with their peers - its impossible for them - it does even out as they get older but his first years at secondary were a bit of a nightmare - and all so predictable. The psyche who diagnosed him predicted it, the school shrugged and we were left to get on with it.

a bit of understanding for the child struggling goes a long long way.

(sorry for the extra thread hijack: VicarInaTutu - your son will find many people who love him to bits in a CS department :-) - may he flourish and be gently encouraged both to be awesome at CS, and to tentatively relax in the big, bad, social world. Beer and like-minded individuals help - I used to love going to the pub with my ex-partner and his friends, all from a certain CS dept - found it much easier going out with them than with my own colleagues, who were all as socially well-adjusted as you'd want doctors to be...)

I think what ObiWan meant was targets specific to SN. Inasmuch as all the labelling and provision that goes with a diagnosis can be a concern for some people, out-of-school activities like Brownies might provide a bit of respite from all of it. I can see that. It's just an additional reason to tread carefully, really.

ask mum to volunteer for a week to see if the child will behave differently? I found out about DD's troubles by volunteering at school and seeing it first hand to compare to peers. It was an eye opener.

Ds used to go to Beavers - we were told to do as many social activities as possible - as if that would somehow magically "cure" him of his social ineptitude. we wer told to do this by a crap ed psyche

when we realised it was just piling on the misery we took him out.

and OP it was another parent who also volunteered who suggested I do it as they had concerns about DD.

We have had a similar situation at our Beavers where I am a leader - a young lad just started in Sept appears to be a "runner". If something happens - even something as minor as he was caught out in a game - he blindly bolts.

First time he did it he managed to get across a busy car park before he was caught and brought back. After that we took steps to make sure he couldn't get out of either the hut or the playing field at the back.

I suspect he has difficulties we haven't been told about - he is very similar to my asd ds who is also a bolter.

I spoke to the scout master about how we handled it and was told that unless his parents had told us of any dx or problem then our role was to ensure the child in question was safe and that the others with him were also safe. Under no circumstances were we to speak to the parents unless he became a danger to the pack or himself.

Ok, Vicar, but the parents might think that Brownies provides a helpfully non-labelled arena (if any labelling is going on at all), and they may or may not be right.

It's quite true I personally would much rather have just not had to go to bloody Brownies (amongst many other things) at all. If making that ok is what AS support can amount to, I rather applaud it. My understanding, though, is that the OP sees this (or rather, was originally seeing this) in terms of intervening to support this child in socialising better. That approach is what I think Obi is responding to.

I think it's a shame that so many children are condemned to a life of constantly feeling different and weird because their parents won't accept that they are different.

I think it is sad that a diagnosis that can help a child is avoided by some parents who think it is an admission of something being "wrong".

I think it is a shame that any parent would look at a caring leader of their child's activity (whether it be a sport, a drama group, scouts, guides or whatever) and be furious, or hurt, or otherwise upset at that leader raising concerns about their child's happiness.

I don't know whether this child is on the autistic spectrum or not. But I think it is such a pity that the question cannot be asked . Because if the child is on the spectrum and is not diagnosed, she will face a lifetime of feeling different and not knowing why.

I say this as a cub leader who has had a few children through cubs who I have felt very strongly had unrecognised difficulties (that I knew were causing problems in school) and being unable to raise it with the parents. A number of these have subsequently, much later, had diagnoses of ADHD and ASD, but have had to suffer for years before getting any help.

It's a shame.

The posters who don't have a child on the autistic spectrum, and who have in this thread tried to imagine what their reaction would be if a Brownie leader mentioned autism in relation to their offspring, are basically, in their mind, tacking a few quirks onto their NT child, and getting outraged at what would then constitute an overreaction on the part of said leader.

I would ignore them all, OP... All of us who know what it's like to live for years with a complete enigma for a child, and who owe their sanity to the courage once shown by a non-professional to utter the word 'autism', will urge you to do it.

Someone said upthread that there is an official Brownie policy/procedure for such cases anyway, that you'll have to look at - I doubt it will tell you to keep your knowledge to yourself and let the parents stew, and I hope it doesn't encourage you to merely drop hints - very good points were made upthread also about how useless these are to parents themselves somewhere on the continuum (like I consider myself to be)

In my son's case the preschool worker just told me "I have just noticed he is very good at X X and Y isn't he!... But he really hates this that and the other... is it the same at home? Do you know, he almost reminds me of a kid we once had who had Asperger's, is that also something you've thought about?" (I had never even heard the word I think...) she said "no, I mean, he doesn't really, mostly, no, but we just happen to have somebody coming in next week who could maybe tell us more, would you like me to ask her what she thinks?" (it was the SENCO who was coming in; I agreed to see her; obviously the SENCO didn't pretend to diagnose either, she just said she would agree, if I wanted, to refer me to a SALtherapist, who would then be able to tell me more if I wanted, and that therapist said that yes, she would, if I wanted, refer me to a development paediatrician. Meanwhile I had googled Asperger's and everything was falling into place... )

I mean this is how diagnoses happen, isn't it? A concern is raised, it's put to the parents, and it's then up to the parents to decide what they want to do with it.

In fact it should be forbidden for concerns to be hidden from the parents... Surely parents should be able to deal with the fact that their kid's behaviour has led somebody to worry; And they should be able to hear it all, not a diluted version of it. Especially since all they need to say is, "thank you for your concern, I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I myself have no concern, we are fine and don't need help." Because some other parents really do need help, you know, and they are dying to hear these things, even if you absolutely don't, and find it apparently quite absurd to imagine you ever would.

i completely agree with you maryzcary

for some parents its all about them, and their pride, and their feelings around having a "label" when it should be about the child, who has the intelligence to realise they are different but not know why.

for DS, he has known since we have. He choses who he discloses it to, but at least he knows why, and he is who he is. He has found his niche and is happy, and im happy if he is happy.

No MadBusLady the OP is concerned that this child could be missing out on professional intervention to help her develop her social skills.

If the OP is right and she has ASD she may be missing out on support which could make a big difference to her self esteem and achievements both socially and academically.

It may take 13 years to train as a psychiatrist, Cahoots but I don't see why that is relevant as it is usually clinical psychologists, paediatricians and other ASD trained professionals who work together to diagnose ASD.

Also the OP wasn't expecting to write a diagnostic report which would trigger lots of intervention and support. She was wondering whether to give some parents some information which could help them approach to right professionals to get support for their DD should they feel the needs to do so.