Reason my DS has learning difficulties

[Mumstheword37]

Posting here for traffic. My son has undiagnosed autism (hoping to have official diagnosis in a few
months). He also has a diagnosis of moderate learning difficulties and has working memory issues. He’s 9 years old. When he was approximately 3.5 his paediatrician sent him for a blood test to see why he had developmental delay as he was way below his age and had very bad and speech delay. He’s still under SALT now, but very much improved compared to when he was younger. The blood test showed nothing. When I asked the paediatrician why he has learning difficulties and if he would catch up, she just said who knows. She was utterly and incredibly rude overall.
I’ve been fighting for years for my son to get help-EHCP and official Asd diagnosis but i keep thinking about the learning difficulties side to it-why does he have them? My slightly older child is incredibly bright. I didn’t drink, smoke, take drugs-literally not even a single pain killers whilst pregnant despite desperately needing them. I stopped taking my antidepressants as soon as I found out I was pregnant. I’m just curious. Can I ask for this to be looked into more? I genuinely don’t know if that is an option. To me my son is absolutely perfect, but he finds life so hard at times and i feel bad for him. Like I said he’s 9, but developmentally he’s more like a 4-6 year old.

I agree that it is important to use the right terms; I work in a diagnostic service myself. Autism and ADHD are not learning difficulties. They may be co-morbid with a learning difficulty but by no means is that always the case.

Agree that a learning disability is a low IQ and problems with everday functioning / activities of daily living. Agree that it will be present before 18 (unless acquired after that point e.g. through an accident).

ADHD is 100% a learning difficulty.

@DollyDoyle you can't acquire a learning disability later in life, effects from something like a brain injury are different. A learning disability is life long. Generally diagnosed in childhood but some older people may be diagnosed in later life for various reasons e.g. they have been cared for by parents and have never had input from services.

I’m really not sure this is true. I work in send. The number of places needed for pre-verbal autistic kids is raising rapidly. The level of needs of the youngest children in complex needs schools is rising rapidly. The number of pre-verbal or gestalt kids who have to be supported in mainstream due to no places in specialist schools is also rising rapidly. This can’t be explained by different diagnostic critera or by the fact they were institutional in the 60s/ 70s. Anyone who has worked in early years and/ or send for the last 10 years or more can see this very clearly.

More support and better understanding of these kids is desperately needed because there are just so many of them.

@HollyKnight ADHD is not a learning difficulty/specific learning disorder (or a learning disability). It's a neurodevelopmental disorder. Learning difficulties do not effect the IQ as a whole e.g. dyslexia.

What about the explosion of cancer diagnosis over the last 150 years?

I wish people with absolutely zero knowledge or experience would refrain from espousing their completely unfounded "belief " when there is a mass of evidence if they bothered to take five minutes to take a look.

@DollyDoyle post 18 accident or illness people wouldn’t be classed as LD by our service, they wouldn’t be eligible and would have to be seen by neurology or whoever. It’s sad sometimes cos there are people who would be a better fit in LD but the rules are strict and we only see who we are commissioned for.
So autistic adult with underlying anxiety who can’t leave the house , struggling with lots of everyday things due to autism, IQ of 65 yes, same picture with IQ of 100 no.
head injury at 16 lowering IQ/struggling with everyday life yes, at 19 no.
maybe other services are more flexible.

as to original post, I was asked to prepare a short lecture on the causes of LD last year, it’s a massive subject, some are inherited or genetic “accidents” some we don’t know, or the evidence just isn’t there to be definitive.
It is something we are learning more about all the time.
i never finished the lecture ….

Go tell that to the government then, and all the universities, charities, psychologists and counsellors who all say it is a learning difficulty. Then try telling the people with ADHD that there is nothing wrong with their ability to learn things.

They were institutionalised, put in orphanages, put in special ed schools, kept at home, or sent to mainstream and left to suffer. It's only more recently that people now care about these children and want to help them. Previously they were labelled the R-word and dismissed by society. I myself was put through mainstream primary for the first 3 years, completely non-verbal, but just classed as extremely shy because no one thought smart girls could be autistic.

You aredistinguishing between Learning Disability (LD) and learning "difficulties"? You list dyslexia as a "learning difficulty", but many dyslexics will have a high IQ since part of the definition is (or used to be) a discrepancy between their overall intelligence and their ability at reading, and dyslexia includes a number of difficulties eg with organisation which in practical terms make it a disability.

@MereDintofPandiculation yes I am distinguishing the two and list autism adhd and dyslexia as examples of learning difficulty rather than disability in my original reply. They can be classed as a disability but not a learning disability as defined by the DoH in the UK, but of course can co exist with LD as well.

I have ADHD. It’s not a learning disability.
People with ND can’t have problems with learning and describe it as a learning difficulty. Which surely literally says it’s something that makes learning difficult for those who have it?
it’s still not a learning disability as defined here tho.

I think this is a matter of whether you work in health or education.

I am an ed psych and we talk about learning difficulties, because we are describing not diagnosing. We talk about global learning difficulties, which are indeed linked to IQ - a controversial subject in itself, but let's call it "likelihood of doing well in an education system". We also talk about specific learning difficulties which would be things like dyslexia, working memory problems, slow processing speed, but where the person's fluid, verbal and spatial reasoning are ok, or more ok. So their ability to understand concepts is ok, but their ability to demonstrate that understanding subsequently is likely to be impacted.

I would not refer to autism or ADHD in itself as a 'learning difficulty" .
This obviously from our initial training.

I mean it would be helpful if there were standardisation but it isn't so at present.

Please see extract from the English law on sen in education, the "code of practice", showing terminology used as I have described.

DrRuthGalloway thanks that’s really interesting, we sometimes get referrals for young adults who don’t meet our criteria (health team) but really would fit but we can’t accept. Also explain a lot of the language used.
agree standardised terms would be a big help.

We have an autistic DS1 and a second DS2 who is currently undergoing an autism assessment (likely also autistic).

Our DS1 was in a class with a non-speaking autistic little boy who also had quite a significant learning difficulty.

From what we understand, autistic behaviours can be associated with a ‘de novo mutation’ (i.e. a new random genetic mutation), which is also often associated with lots of other issues, such as major health problems and serious learning difficulties. If that happens, it’s really just bad luck.

You can also be autistic because lots of your family have autistic traits and you inherit them. Our DS1 and DS2 are in that position. There’s a lot of technical jobs/visual thinking/dyslexia/delayed speech/verbally-inarticulate smart people on both sides of our family. DS1 is pretty-much an engineering savant. DS2 is turning out similar. They have on-paper speech and language difficulties, but it’s compensated by their visual intelligence and, as such, they come across as weird rather than disabled.

My eldest is severely autistic with severe learning disabilities. I never think it’s anything I did.

Yes I understand this but it seems currently that very other family has a child ( often more than one )being assessed or diagnosed, unless it's just on MN ?

That's MN for you

Maybe it's genetic? Are you and his dad older parents? Older parents are more likely to have dc with Sen.

There are multiple reasons why autism appears to be dramatically increasing. Firstly, having a child with a disability was considered shameful until fairly recently. My dh was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome as an adult after his parents tried to avoid getting him diagnosed. Secondly more ND people are meeting other ND people and having ND children.

OP I have a 10 year old with MLD but not autism. We have a few theories as to why but no definite cause.

your post is just, well not at all correct.

i am what you would term HFA/aspergers, i was not diagnosed till mid teens.

I stim constantly, i have never managed to make or keep friends. I have two friendly acquaintances from school, and friendly acquaintances at my volunteering job, but I wouldn’t say they were actual friends. I wish they were my friends, im not sure.

i can only speak to people outside my immediate family, if I have a set thing to say. Like at my volunteering job, i do the till, but if someone tries to make conservation I freeze up. If anything doesn’t go as expected I need someone else to help.

i have a uni degree.

i can’t work, its too much pressure and i just can’t cope. The volunteering works as it’s no pressure, i don’t have to be there.

i did not thrive independently as an adult. I am late 20s and its just not possible.

in many ways i am exactly the same as a child, from like 2 years old through adult age.

there is no one end or the other, there are many that go from each end to the other. It’s not an either or.

also many non speaking autistic children, grow up, become speaking (on different levels depending on the child), work or go to uni or volunteering or different things. Just because a child is autistic non speaking at say 3, or even 10, doesn’t mean they will stay that way forever.

obviously there is no problem if the child never speaks, or doesn’t get to a different level. That’s just how they are. But just because they seem that way as a child doesn’t been they are like that forever. It is different for every single autistic person.

my son has a similar profile to yours- we have no idea why. He’s never had genetic testing to be fair but this isn’t something I have felt the need to do. One of his main difficulties is with language, which has a genetic element but there isnt a family history so he would have the ‘denovo’ element.
There is no family history on either side anfd other children have no difficulties. Sometimes something just goes a bit awry in utero and there is no way of pinpointing it imo

Fully agree with this post

Well this thread has become a bit of a mess.

The reason I mentioned pseudoscience is that ND is very, VERY trendy on social media right now. Which does not mean I don't think it exists. My life has been improved immeasurably with my own diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. The problem is that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of greedy fingers hoping to get their hands on your money, taking advantage of people's hope that "just this next one thing" will make things better. I get bombarded with them, I must see 20+ ads a day for different supplements, exercise programs, planners, workshops, apps, meditation, approaches, explanations, blah blah blah. The vast vast majority of it, especially if it is aggressively marketed, is a pure cash grab.

I don't know enough about retained reflexes to be perfectly honest to make a judgement. I just have seen some criticism/scepticism about them. I would simply recommend to everyone whatever condition you're dealing with whatever treatment or suggestion or practice you want to look into, seek out experts in the field and be sceptical of everything. It might be that there is something in that - but the other thing I see recently is people taking some topic which actually does have some good evidence or theory behind it and doing it badly and calling it the same thing. For example, nervous system regulation. Incredibly trendy right now. Huge buzzword - also happens to be probably the most valuable thing I have learnt about over the last year, both for myself and my child (suspected ND, not sure which flavour). But now I am starting to see it pop up as a buzzword everywhere in ways where it is little more than a sticking plaster.

If you can try something for little to no cost to you then try it - why not. Just be careful of placebo effect. For example if you can't access ADHD medication then there's no harm in trying things like diet and supplements, but if you do have access to it then it makes no sense to try those things first because medication has such a stronger record of being effective for the majority of people. Don't put off an effective treatment for something which might have a slight beneficial effect. (And BTW, exercise is the second most effective treatment after medication for ADHD, I'm not putting it down.)

@Lindy2 thanks. I’m very accepting of his asd, he is exactly who he’s meant to be and he’s perfect, I am just curious as to why he has the learning disability. Luckily I’m confident in knowing I didn’t cause his autism- I was told by an Ed psych that assessed him that he doesn’t have autism but if he does it’s either because I have a smart meter or it’s something I did during pregnancy. She’s literally said that to me..I was stunned. Obviously I made a complaint about her because she was disgraceful.
i do have quite a good support network, luckily. I’ve made friends with other sen parents which has helped so much over the years.