Toddler crying

[Starfish25]

Hi, not sure if this is a phase or not but my 3 year old has suddenly started to burst out crying. We are currently on holiday- took him the park about to go down a slide when he started to full blown cry, tears the lot! He didn't hurt him self as I was with him. Nor me or my partner could control his crying, this went on for about 10 mins until we were able to distract him. The only time he would ever cry is when he had badly hurt him self. He then again started to cry when we took him in the pool that last only a few minutes. Then just coming out for tea, got him ready and said let's go he began again. Tears, sobbing everything but he's been totally fine in the hotel, eating and drinking fine. He also done this at dinner time when we got in to the restaurant. My little boy is unable to communicate properly- speech delay. So it's hard to figure out what is wrong. We have gone through everything with him that we think he would want. Not sure if this is worth mentioning but hes on the asd pathway. Thanks if anyone can help xx

Is he able to communicate to you if something hurts? Earache? Toothache? Just thinking some pain comes and goes.

If he is on the ASD pathway you will probably be aware that hyper sensitivities to certain environment stimuli is common with ASD. This could be a high sensitivity to sounds, lights, smells, touch, tastes, etc. For example, a background noise that we would just ignore could sound like a hammer drill on his ears, the same could be with visual stimulus (like lights, colors), smells or touches. Does he tend to cover his ears or eyes, etc when crying? the other possibilities could be that that children with ASD really struggle to self-regulate (they try to self-regulate by stimming, so hand flapping, and engaging in other repetitive behaviors) but when it gets too much they just breakdown and have a meltdown as everything has just become too overwhelming, nothing will calm them down, touching/hugging them normally makes it worse. Maybe some of the above, or maybe not, it is hard to tell :)

Yeah if he ever has anything like that he would pull at his ears ect but he's not. I am baffled xx

Thank you very much Aladdinmum hes only recently been put on the pathway so everything is new to me at the moment. It's so hard to get my head around. So maybe the noise of when we are out is affecting him today as we've been here 9 days an hes been fine. Is it possible that the same thing wont affect him tomorrow? By strimming do you mean likes of humming? As he does that a lot. Thank you for all that info truly helped xx

Yes, humming would be classified as stimming. However, that in itself does not mean ASD, many adults also do that and many other repetitive behaviors that would also be classified as stiming (shaking their leg, biting their nails, cracking knuckles, etc).