3 year old behaviour

[Treesarered]

Hi I was wondering if anyone had an advice or had been through something similar.

My daughter is 3.5 and has been attending nursery for 15 months. She has always been hard work and has tantrums if she can't get her own way. A worker at nursery advised a couple of months ago she has started have tantrums quite a lot during transitional periods like going inside from playing outside etc. She is like this at home at times too. They referred her to seeing the health visitor.

The HV came to the house for a visit a couple of weeks ago and wasn't concerned about DD at all. I thought it was just typical three year old behaviour and she would grow out of it.

Just had a phone call now from the HV asking her to visit them next week because they think the tantruming is something more serious. Nursery haven't mentioned anything to me in weeks. I picked her up the last time a couple of days ago and they didn't mention anything apart from she hasn't eaten her dinner again but she had a good day.

I'm at a loss now at what I can do or what is wrong with my daughter. Could she be autistic? Does anyone else have an autistic girl thus I could speak to. Many thanks.

You might have to wait a couple of hours for a response since you asked quite a specific question.

You might want to see if the symptoms of female autism match those of your daughter.

Rigidity over transitioning (so for example excessive tantrums when transitioning from one activity to another) can and has been linked to autism in the past, however that in itself would not be enough to say that someone is autistic, other behaviors would have to be present. First and foremost, autism affects social communication so deficits must be present in that area for any kind of diagnosis, however, I agree that normally this does present differently in girls versus boys (girls are naturally more socially motivated than boys so are able to mask deficits much better than boys from a very early age so can be much harder to see).