Worried my four month old may be showing early autism signs

[Mumlife26]

My baby is 4 months old. Let me start by saying, if I had read one of these posts before I had my baby then I would have rolled my eyes and said that a 4 month old isn’t showing signs of autism.

However, I don’t understand how my baby can show these developmental signs and not receive a diagnosis in the future?

I am a teacher and my previous role was in an SEN base. Everyone in my family is saying I’m just focussing on things that every baby does but I am seeing them as signs of autism because of my experience.

Signs I’m seeing:

• Lack of eye contact. This is the biggest one. From about 10 weeks old, she will actively avoid eye contact when being held. Everyone told me that my baby would stare into my soul. Sometimes she will but only from a distance - on the changing table, from the play mat, in the pram but as soon as she is held she will actively avoid looking at me or whoever is holding her. She will move her head to the side to look away. She will not make eye contact when feeding at all really - she will very rarely. This is the hardest one for me because I am finding it quite difficult to bond as she would rather look anywhere else than at me. This hurts my child development brain as it’s really hard to engage/sing/chat to a baby who will not look at me.
• Her toes are constantly scrunched/curled. It’s not all the time but majority of the day, she will be keeping her toes scrunched and curled. She is able to flatten them however a lot of the time she keeps them in this position. I am worried this is sensory and is this the start of tiptoe walking? She also keeps her thumbs tucked when reaching or grabbing things.
• She stiffens her body when excited or angry. She will make fists with her hands and hold them out in front of her and shake slightly and straighten her legs. At first I thought she is so excited, she doesn’t know what to do with her body. But I watched a TikTok video and the first sign a lady noticed in her baby was stiffening. So obviously now I’m hyper alert to this and it’s just added to the signs.
• She is happy to entertain herself. She doesn’t seek attention and will happily lay on her playmat for a while without looking for me or wanting attention. When she wakes in the morning she will just lay in the next to me looking around or making noises to herself until I go in to get her. Shes happy looking at the light fitting or the curtains.
• In general, only cries if she is very hungry or very tired. I’ve heard this is a sign.
• She is an extremely fussy feeder. It is a struggle to get her to finish a bottle. She turns her head away. Spits the bottle out. Wriggles around.
• Extreme reactions to loud sounds e.g hair dryer / someone sneezing / most recently the hand dryer.
• Now I feel like I’m noticing stimming such as rubbing her feet together and her hands seem quite twirly.
• She also arches her back away when being held. Is quite stiff in general.
• She rolled front to back at 3.5 months for 2 days and she hasn’t done it again. Is this a regression of skills? She isn’t rolling back to front although I know this is up to 6 month skill.
• Shes not laughing or giggling.

Things I’m not worried about.

• She is a very smiley happy baby.
• She can be very engaged when not being held - when she is laying down, she will look and give lovely smiles and chat to you.
• great eye tracking. Will follow you around the room, up the stairs. We call her nosy rosy because she is always watching when someone is walking around the room.
• She sleeps 12 hrs at night with 1 or 2 wake ups.
• Holds her head up
• Grabs toys, bats at toys. Will reach for toys when doing tummy time. Brings hands to mouth. Able to put toys in mouth.
• Can be chatty - although it feels like this has got less the past few weeks and she can be quiet.

Im actually not sure what the point of this post is. If it was one or two signs then I wouldn’t be as worried but having so many signs (there are more but those are the most concerning) I’m a concerned mum who wants to support my baby in the best way. Does anyone have any experience of these developments in a baby? How can I support my baby? Thank you for reading.

Yes I thought reflux as a lot of it sounded like my son who was very uncomfortable as a baby due to that.

id seek some MH support as your clearly very anxious about your child potentially being ND.

i’m sure you know, as well as anyone else that there’s nothing you can do about it even if they are autistic. And I’m sure you know it’s very genetic Perhaps that might help alleviate your fears if there’s no obvious signs of it in and around your family or the baby’s father’s family

Either way, I would seek support because you’re detailed level of questioning is worrisome

FWIW, my youngest who was diagnosed with autism at aged 8 did not have any noticeable signs of autism at 4 months old. You list a long list of things, all of which are totally normal behaviour for a small baby and easily within the expected range of development.

The best thing you can do to "support" your baby is just to do all the normal mum things and stop hyper focussing on what you think are "signs".

Do you have autism in your family? It is hereditary, so more likely if it is present.

Otherwise, why worry? Far too early to tell. Your baby sounds healthy and happy. You sound like you may have postnatal stress. Please take care of yourself.

I think your over analysing due to your knowledge

My dd is autistic and generally makes no eye contact. At 4 months old though I wouldn't be able to tell you what her eye contact was like.

She sounds like a typical baby. Has she had her eyes checked? Perhaps she struggles focusing on things that are close to her?

don’t compare behaviours that you would typically see in an Autistic older child. What you’ve described-arched back, hand movements, toes curling is all normal. She sounds like a content and happy baby. My dd didn’t like milk much but loved food when we was weaned.

In a baby that young scrunching toes is much more to do with developing feet than anything else.

Eye contact is a big ask at that age - the eyes are sending the data to the brain but need to "learn" things like focus, perspective, depth, colour and so on. On top of that, they are learning what the material world around them is - a face, a wall, a chair, table, house, a bottle etc. It could be incredibly disconcerting for a baby to have someone peering into their eyes, and indeed it is aggressive to stare into the eyes of young children.

You need to observe your baby in terms of general development rather than through the very narrow optics of autism. You are not doing your baby or yourself any favors at all.

The bottle might not be satisfying.

Sounds just like my DD at that age, she is now an adult with no ASD traits. My adult DS who was diagnosed when he was at preschool ASD and GDD showed none of these signs.

All sounds normal baby stuff to me. And I have 2 with autism. The signs, ime, start showing around age 2.

Your TikTok algorithm is messing with your head. IME (3x DC) everything you describe is perfectly normal, age appropriate, healthy development for a baby of that age. It's normal for them to look away for example, because their eyesight isn't very good yet. They can generally only really focus on your face when they are about half an arms' length away (in a standard feeding position). Most things outside this distance range (both closer and further away) are basically a blur.

Speak to your health visitor if you are worried about your baby's development. Please consider stepping away from the apps, and increasing time spent interacting with people IRL - which is not intended to be an insult, it's just one of the best counter-actions to this kind of thing. IME when my babies were little I found mum and baby groups to be very helpful - this helps you make more realistic comparisons, as well as being possibly a source of support. I was obsessed with my babies at that age and all I wanted to do was talk about them, so other new mums who also felt this way were brilliant.

Remember, the algorithms on these apps are trained to maximise the time your app spends open on your phone, that's it. The posts which are most likely to make you keep returning to the app and stay on the app for longest are those which your brain is subconsciously marking as very important information. As a new mother, your brain is also extremely focused on the safety and wellbeing of your baby, so anything which suggests there might be something going on there automatically gets weighted as very important. The brain system which does this isn't especially good at weeding out good from bad information (and the app overrides this anyway) it just stores everything as a sort of "just in case" but this is self feeding. The more you consume it, the more your brain thinks it must be important, and the more you watch it the more it will be shown to you. Over time, even the safeguards of the rational part of your brain get overridden because this part is designed to assess a mess of contradictory information by seeing which bits get repeated most consistently, and so you'll start to feel that certain bits of false information are probably true, but this is simply because they have been repeated so often that it's like they're passing the "rational fact checker" check which was never designed to handle the amount of information you see on platforms like TikTok.

The algorithm is targeting all of this and this exact cycle. It's not designed to increase your anxiety as such. It's just that the makers of the apps don't give a shit whether it's increasing your anxiety, as long as it makes you spend longer on your phone, which you will if your brain (subconsciously) feels it might be important for the wellbeing of your child. The makers of the videos, equally, aren't necessarily targeting these kinds of feelings on purpose, but many of them DO know what kinds of content tends to lead to higher views, and many of them target views and don't give a shit whether their content is accurate or not. Some content creators on these apps actually do purposefully create anxiety-provoking misinformation because they are part of a longer pipeline to steer you towards antivax content and sell you a "cure" for autism. One major way they do this is by highlighting imaginary "autism signs" which are actually perfectly normal development, which many many babies will do. You are in the peak of this target group because your baby will likely have recently been vaccinated, and they can hyper-target this now. Some content creators are well meaning people who have been taken in by this themselves. Some are parents of children who are actually autistic or have other developmental issues and they are genuinely trying to be helpful but their content (which might be accurate, or well-meaning but misleading) gets swept up in this storm of the view chasers and the antivax pipeline stuff.

It's really really easy to get sucked into this, and honestly the best things you can do are 1. Get baby seen by a medical professional, 2. Delete the apps ASAP, 3. Increase time spent with people IRL (IME, preferably people with babies of a similar age), but literally any human contact IRL can reduce the effects of this kind of horrible, pervasive, algorithm-driven anxiety cycle. 4. If the worries persist or they are already extreme, then get yourself seen by perinatal mental health.

Your baby sounds gorgeous and healthy. Please don't get trapped in worrying and let it ruin this time which should be such a joy.

My eldest is autistic. He did a couple of the things on your list, not others though. For what it's worth he has always had cracking eye contact.

I destroyed my entire year of mat leave with him by worrying about what might be. The outcome was the same so I wish I'd just enjoyed that year with him instead of googling myself into an anxious mess.

It IS too early to tell what the future holds, even if a professional were to say to you right now "yes your child is definitely autistic" - which let's be clear no professional is ever going to do - it would still make no difference as there's not really anything you can do differently at that age.

Oh and I would add - I've seen a similar concern before where people who work professionally with older children who have SEN can sometimes worry when they notice similarities in their much younger baby.

With this, please remember that autism and many other conditions are neurodevelopmental - meaning that they represent a developmental delay. Behaviours or mannerisms which might be associated with autism in much older children can be perfectly normal when they occur at the usual developmental time. It's when they persist past the point that children usually outgrow them that we find them concerning.

You literally described my daughter as a baby. She’s 16 now and no ND. Some babies are just like that. There’s no way to know until they hit toddlerhood.

Sounds totally normal at that age. I'd consider some support for feeding if that is very difficult. And possibly some support for your own anxiety. There is literally nothing you can do - most important you get out the house and let her experience the world, go to baby groups, take her swimming, don't spend hours at home disecting everything she does / doesn't do.

Genetics play a big part OP
Have you or her dad a neurodivergent family?

Way way too early to consider autism. However, from what you described, if you are concerned about developmental disorder contact your GP.

@Whoops75 No neurodivergence in either families. So far 😂

Give the girl a chance. Poor.kid, 4 months old!!

Most of what you listed sounds pretty ordinary to me. I'm no expert though - just a parent who has spent time around lots of other babies as well and supported other parents.

Remember that development is not necessarily a linear process and the different ages attached to 'stages' of development are often just averages within a particular context.

One thing I would seriously advise though is to avoid getting health information from random people on TikTok or any other social media. It can cause a lot of undue worry, if not actual harm. Speak to your health visitor or GP if you have concerns and it'll probably do you a world of good to delete your TikTok account.

OP, I am autistic as is one of my DCs and so are various other members of my family. This is actually not particularly screaming autism at me. I am
surprised I am saying this- I have commented on many similar posts and usually agree with the OP
that autism is a possibility, even when most other posters are saying definitely not autism.

I would strongly advise that you don’t look at any information about autism on TikTok because
most of it is misleading or completely incorrect. Look at decent information such as anything produced by the National Autistic Society.

I would mention to the health visitor about the feeding issue, the eye contact and lack of laughter. However all you can do now is watch and wait and enjoy her. You sound worried but there is really no point in worrying at the moment because there is nothing you can do.

Sounds like my son as baby, slept great, fussy feeder, happy independently.

He is older now and definitely not autistic.

She may be autistic, she may not, but honestly, nothing you have listed in your post sounds massively out of the ordinary for a 4 month old baby.

A lot of what you have described sounds like silent refux @Mumlife26

Op, my now 35 year old son was only 8 months old when I first told my friend “I think he has something I read about in the Woman’s Own, it’s called Autism.” I was correct. Not only that I’d asked a paediatrician to check him a second time a few hours after birth as ‘things’ just didn’t feel right to me. He was my 5th child and I was an experienced mum. I even asked the same friend when she came to visit me that evening “does he seem ok to you”. She too was the mum of 5. People will say you can’t tell at such a young age but I’ve now met countless mums over the years on forums and in real life who pretty much from the time their baby was months old that something was amiss. And interestingly enough the mum in the magazine article was interviewed because autism wasn’t really mainstream then and she too had concerns for her baby at a few months of age. By the time my son was 12 months old another friends husband asked her “what’s going on with the wee boy”.

I don’t know if your DD is autistic or not and my only advice to you is to start writing down all of your concerns so that by the time he perhaps has his 12 month check up you can tell your paediatrician.

And if your DD is autistic? Well, all I can say is that my severely autistic son who is also epileptic and has Tourette’s as well as bipolar disorder makes my heart absolutely sing.