can someone please explain Autism to me please.

[fairydust]

dd is 3 1/3 yrs old and goes to a mainstream nursery she has CP and is mentally about 1 yr behind but is doing fantsticlly.

She's struck up a friendship with a little boy who has Autism - "A" seems to be totally hooked with our dd and his parents have invited dd for a playdate over the xmas holiday - of course we've said yes

with out sounding too ignorant can anyone please expalin to me what Autism is i've looked on the net and like most things it all seems gooblie gook to me and seeing as his parents made the effort to find out about dd's condition (was told thid by a good friend) it seems only right i do the same.

Playdates are a hole new experience dd has a few friends we meet regualrly but they've know her from date dot.

I hsvn't wrote this thread to offend anyone i generally want to know.

as it sounds like an x in the word lol.

I don't know the answer to that! I just asked my Dh who is a doctor if it was a medical abbreviation and he said that Rx has always been used to mean prescription or treatment and these days people seem to use that "formula" for everything, so History=Hx, Diagnosis=Dx etc so I guess that is where it comes from.

Don't know if anyone else has a better explanation .

hmmm how strange!

My son is severly autistic, but he's not really in his own world. He's often very much in ours, trying to drag me off when I'm trying to do xmas cards, screaming because the computer is on (not allowed now for some reason), screaming because the cup cupboard door is open (won't walk in the kitchen if it is). He spends a lot of time at the moment climbing on my back and hanging from my neck (as a large 6 year old that's quite annoying). His eye contact is very good, often quite intense, especially when being naughty.

He can't play, finds it very difficult to settle to anything, and needs constant supervision. All the autistic children I know are very different. The ones I know at ds1's level need a lot of supervision and generally show challenging behaviours (often because they don't understand why they have to behave in a certain way and their compulsions (rather than obsessions- I would say you need to be reaonably HF to have obsessions rather than compulsions) pull them to act in a certain way. Wo betide if real life gets in the way.

OJ - we no longer bother with shoe shops (the kicking we could cope with, but the waiting, oh no, so it got to the stage where we needed 2 people to go, one to wait in the queue, one to walk around qith ds1 and wait to be phoned, and with 2 pre-schoolers as well it's not easy to find 2 people who can manage ds1 and another adult to look after the other 2). However we have a bit of a win - My friend's (with a HFA dd) sister is a manager of a Clarks shop. She brings shoes to us. DS1 doesn't kick her and is usually happy to try on shoes. Very different from a shoe shop.

it must be very frustrating for him? being unable to settle at things, and not playing etc... finding things to fill the time must be really difficult, and tiring! can he have a conversation with you?

sorry if i am asking too many questions, please tell me to p**s off if i am being too nosy!

He can't talk! He can say something like "ee eee eee" (xmas tree- a fave this week). and "du dye aiee ar" (bye bye granny's car.). I hope that his speech will become clearer so that strangers realise he is tsalking, but I doubt he'll ever be conversational.

One of the many difficulties with the spectrum, that others have mentioned is that every child had a unique pattern of difficulties.

I teach a young man with aspergers/HFA. He is astonishingly bright.....will get A*s in his science GCSEs and I have already taught him most of the A level sylabus. A few years ago he needed an adult support worker with him at all times in school as he was a danger to himself and others due to some of his Autistic behaviours. He had major sensory issues and would go into the most astonishing meltdaowns. Now that he is older, and because he is exceptionaly bright/ High functioning, he is learning how to interact with his peers. But all of the things that we do innatly , he has to learn.

He can now wait till the end of the lesson for extra information....something that I know is almost impossible for him....but he is doing so well and I am very proud of him

He is very high functioning, but still has significant probelms due to his ASD

Something else that often gets overlooked or taken for granted is the co-morbidities that can come with ASD. So many children with severe autism ALSO have learning disability which is what probably puts them in the severe part of the spectrum. You do hear of people with ASD who cannot talk but don't have LD(Sue Rubin?). Others have OCD, Tourettes, dyspraxia etc. Autism on its own is quite unusual I think, even people with AS often have co-morbidities that cause extra difficulties.

We are pursuing a treatment called RDI and the way the people that have developed this describe somebody with autism is as having trouble with the following:

1. sharing experience and emotional reaction with other people
2. borrowing someone else's perspective - to look to them to help them resolve certain situations, noticing whether they are approving or disapproving etc
3. "co-ordinating" with someone else e.g. when playing peek a boo, walking with them, stopping and starting with them etc - regulating their actions in reference to another persons
4. reflecting on past experiences and anticipating future ones - using an experience they have had to avoid a negative result or repeat a positive one
5. going with the flow - adapting to change and new conditions, seeing things in shades of grey rather than black and white, coming up with multiple right answers

I think this is quite an interesting view of it and is a bit different from the diagnostic triangle particularly as it doesn't directly mention imaginative play at all.

I think it is very hard for the public to gain an understanding of autism, not only because the spectrum is so varied, but because the way autism is rflected in the media is so black and white. There seems to be no in between, a child either has autism, or he doesn't.

My neighbour has a child with severe autism, he is 10 now and has no language or communication skills, is very sensitive to change, even taking him to the news agents can take over an hour, he can be very violent, and yet is sometimes very affectionate, and becomes very upset by loud noise, to the extent that she felt she could never have another child because a baby crying would have had such an impact on her son. And yet until he was 2 his development appeared to be normal, he had good language skills and then lost them totally. When looking back she says she knows now that he was just copying, not making conversation, but it was still very hard for her to come to terms with the fact that her child who once could talk, now can't.

This is all very enlightening.

Can I ask two questions, please?

What is stimming?

At what age would autistic traits manifest, or should that be a what age would you notice a child is not quite 'normal'?

Thanks

stimming normally refers to some of teh unusual movements, hand flapping, finger twizzling taht sort of thing, an unusual repetative movement.

and symptons manifest most obviously by age 3. Normally starting to appear at around 18 months I think.

Though many parents, myself includd wil tell you they've known somethings not quite right from day 1.

Message withdrawn

Not sure if I dare ask this, but did any of you attribute your childrens' autism to MMR?

I have a friend who has a friend with autism (don't know the person in question) and she was adament that her daughter became autistic as result of MMR. She then went on to have another child and then said she realized now that her DD was never quite right

My ds wiggles his fingers in front of his eyes, and 'walks' his fingers across flat surfaces. But what I find really annoying is his vocal stimming, and although he's doing it right now, I find it really hard to decsribe what it sounds like. We've tried to stop him, but no sooner does he stop, he starts again, and its so irritating.
I had concerns about my ds before he had the MMR, so he wasn't affected by that.

Neither of my boys had any reaction to the MMR. With hindsight ds1's traits were there right from birth, when he had to be tube-fed because he absolutely refused to let anything near his mouth. He reacted badly to the DTP though and I sometimes wonder if that had a long-term effect.

Ds2 had traits as a baby (hated noise, obsessed with all things red and would only sleep if facing the washing machine) but it was only towards the end of the first year that I started to realise that there was more to it. Before then I was fairly sure he was NT but now I realise that he wasn't.

The general pattern for the small number of MMR affected children I know tends to go something like developing normally, MMR, massive seizures shortly afterwards (not febrile), regression.

We believe that ds1 was affected by mercury, both in the DTP's and from other exposures (reasons too boring to go into here). He also regressed following eczema herpeticum at 11 months (that actually fits with being mercury damaged in the first place as well, according to some research).

First realised that something was wrong at 17 months when I realised that ds1 should be pointing. various professionals told me that he "definitely" wasn't autistic over the course of the next 18 months. Even though a trained monkey should have been able to diagnose him. An ENT surgeon finally dxed him just short of 3 (well she didn't but she said she thought he was autistic, was horrified at the various brush offs we'd been given and sent some very sternly worded letters off to various people). He was then fast tracked and dxed at 3.He is severely autistic.

DS3 is just short of 1 year, and despite watching him like a hawk I just don't know. He's sociable and smiley (although less smiley than ds1), copies, waves etc, but I think his joint attention is crap which is a big sign of autism. At 11 months I was convinced ds2 was autistic, by 15 months I knew he was fine.

dd2 i just knew something wasnt right. she went grey at3months old following brocholitis, maybe something happened then i dunno. she has been referred for assessment. dd3 i dont have any worried about, she is very social and passes me things all the time, dd2 never did.

whats joint attention jj?

Coming out of the woodwork here a bit. Ds did have great eye contact, and definitely pointed (I have numerous pix of it) and has been diagnosed with dyspraxia, but atm is definitely showing more Aspergers traits and his eye contact is awful. he actually prefers to look at us through the corner of his eyes and that frightens the hell out of me. he is also having problems having properly reciprocal conversations - the 'tennis' of normal conversation - and in working cooperatively with me. He is very happy if you follow him, but he finds the give and take of interaction very hard.

hi aloha. will u ask for more assessments to be done? he reminds me of dd2 in some ways. conversations here are hard, dd2 repeats most of what i say, not much of her own cobnversation, unless its her initiating the conversation. hard to explain.

tbh he never repeats, but he is very keen to keep up a monologue on his own! But yes, he likes conversation best on his own terms. He will spontaneously tell me things - he told me how much he enjoyed listening to David Copperfield (the Dickens not the dick-head ) on the radio today after it had finished, which was lovely, but he does live very much in his own world and is so much worse lately it frightens me. The other day he was spinning around in the kitchen conducting a long monologue about a 'story' he was telling that made no sense to me.
I am back on the fish oils with a vengeance (had run out).

I feel I need some help atm, yes. Don't quite know where to get it from though.

so are we (back on fish oils) .