My DD1 (will be 3 next month) started nursery back in March after the schools finally returned having spent a whole year locked up at home because of COVID. Having finally seen her with kids her age it was obvious she was behind on her social and communication skills. I wasn’t too worried about the social side as I was exactly the same at my age and did grow out of this. But feel awful that I hadn’t picked up on her speech/communication.
She is great with words and can communicate well however what we hadn’t picked up on was that it was all reparative speech. I’ve since seen that this is called Echolalia. All her functional speech is how we’ve said it eg. ‘Would you like a buscuit’ not ‘I would like’. You also can’t really ask her questions about things she’s done. So if I asked if she had fun at school she would instead just start naming her teachers. She also loves reciting tv programmes and nursery rhymes.
The first 6 months of lockdown, my husband and I had to work from home with no childcare so meant we had to give our almost then 2 year old our phone and kids YouTube to get through the day. I was also heavily pregnant so we got into bad habits and meant she had a lot of daily screen time (this has now been stopped) so we always put the tv reciting down to this. She also speaks in this weird American/English hybrid which we put down to the screen time but a bit of Googling and I saw that these traits are all associated with ASD.
It doesn’t matter if she has this or not. She’s amazing but Im struggling with everything now I'm out of the COVID bubble and guess I’m just looking for anyone who has been through this?
She can follow quite complex instructions so I know she can understand us. Just feeling all the mum guilt that firstly I never noticed she may have ASD or if she doesn’t then it’s likely all the screen time has been a cause. Parenting is such an emotional/stressful rollercoaster isn’t it!