PDD-NOS - Asperger's

[mlr]

I asked a question about PDD-NOS over in Education, but thought I might be able to get more insight into it by asking here, more about ASD than education.

My son's school thinks he has PDD-NOS. They have another child in the school who has Asperger's and say that my son 'is nothing like that', which seems rather irrelevant to me, as two ASD children could be very differnt from each other.

My son certainly has difficulties in school, and although I can see hints of autism in what they are saying, a lot of it could just be shyness and boredom. Both my parents (special needs teachers), my partner's aunt (teacher in an asperger's unit), my son's childminder (an Early Years Playgroup leader) cannot see anything unusual in my son's behaviour.

Given that none of these people see my son in school, where the presence of large numbers of children may make autistic symptoms appear more, their opinions may be wrong.

So what do I do? What do I say to the Educational Psychologist who is coming next academic year to do an assessment?

Well, we are attempting to bring in some strategies at the moment. We have a star chart, with a financial reward. My son has no interest in the financial reward, but he is very keen on filling in charts.

There has been an improvement since the start of the fish oil (day three now). I am rather inclined to think that it cannot be caused by the fish oil already, but rather by our more positive attitude now that we are giving the fish oil. He has got full star charts sent back from school in the home/school book.

I am also using a strategy of not helping, so as to increase his independence, as the school goes on about lack of independence a lot. If he asks me what something means I tell him he has to look it up. He looked up the meaning of noun and then went away and completed an exercise of underlining words that were nouns. The actual activity doesn't help with his weaknesses, like the storytelling problem, but at least he did it on his own, and that makes such a difference.

Have you found any answers to the storytelling problem, or the sequencing one?

What concerns me is that I cannot keep up any kind of focused and consistent parenting every single day, and I wonder how the rest of you with children are a bit different from the norm manage it.