2 month old....possible autism....

[drained1]

Please don't judge, my 9 year old son is autistic so i have a lot of knowledge on autism.

My 2 month old son holds no eye contact whatsoever. He has never actually looked at me. He is smiling but not at me....when he's staring into space in smiles.....it's not at anything in general. If i get closer to him, he turns his head away from me.

I try everything to gage his attention but nothing works, he constantly moves his head from left to right looking at absolutely everything but me....or anyone else.

If I didn't have an autistic child already, I wouldn't be worried but so far he's doing exactly what my son did as a baby.

I know I could be over thinking/worrying. But if I'm not then what do I do? I know there is not health professional that's going to take me seriously at this young age.

Also is there anything I can try to get him to focus on me?

Thank you

Does he respond to sound? A rattle, jingly earrings, a 3 note melody you could sing or hum, tap your hands together 3 times, anything that he can associate with you that you can do anywhere.

I'd keep a note of everything he does so that when he's old enough it can add to the information needed for an assessment.

I think the best thing you can do at such a young age is simply try to put your worries to the back of your mind and relax.

I have 3dc, a ds who is now 15 with asd diagnosed and a dd who is 3 with asd (undiagnosed as yet)
My NT dd was very different from my other two from the word go and I did recognise the differences early on.
The one thing that stood out the most was how sensitive they were to the environment. The children with asd would scream when put into the bath, or at nappy change, or when filling a nappy
Regarding eye contact I don't think any of my children would hold my gaze for too long as a baby, but that only concerned me with my ds when he was about 8 months or so, I guess that was the start of my suspicions. My dd's eye contact isn't too bad when she wants to communicate, making diagnosis harder.
It's so hard when they are young as I think you have suspicions when you have other children with autism.
What I can say is my dd who is 5 now and isn't on the spectrum pretty much made me aware when she started babbling and talking, there was a back and forth communication that I hadn't seen before. I knew she was unlikely to be in the spectrum probably about 5-6 months.
Sorry if I ramble 
Hope this helps x

My DS is autistic, my DD isn’t... didn’t stop me pouncing in every single thing she did until she was about 5 as a possible autistic trait

The thing is, whether you’re worrying about something that’s going to turn out to just be a baby thing or whether it is something that might be a sign of autism, there’s nothing you can do with a newborn.

It’ll probably not stop you worrying to be fair, but does it help to know other people do it too?

The back and forth communication in my second son at 3 years old only then made me think he wasn’t , but I admit I sort of knew he wasn’t very early on with the engaging smiles and wanting to play from 18 months.

Thank you so much for all these replies.

I should also point out I have a dd who isn't on the spectrum also. And again I knew she wasn't on the spectrum from an early age. The only thing that concerned me about her was that she never laughed/giggled.

Baby is still grumpy after his 1st jabs but I'm going to try relax instead of looking for every little thing. It's just so worrying yet he's growing so fast and I don't want to spend it full of anxiety.

I will keep a diary though.....and hopefully find a decent hv who I feel I can talk too

This may sound like a dumb question but does he track items? Hold things up in front of him when he’s alert and happy and move it around to see if he follows the object. He could have poor vision. My boy was preemie and started wearing glasses at 12 months and his wonderful eye doctor said the youngest patient he’d had fitted for glasses was an eight month old. I’m mom of a severe special needs son so I can honestly say the capacity to worry about your child is limitless! Best of luck you’re doing so well! Can’t imagine coping with multiple children.

If you are in/near London, it might be worth contacting the Birkbeck Babylab Staars research project which I think charts/analyses the very early development of the sibs of children with ASD to try, inter alia, to identify the earliest markers.

But zzzz is right - the key question for you is how you shape your parenting to reflect your concerns - eg as much 1:1 time as poss, working on joint attention, imitation etc. Wishing you the very best