Benefits of a diagnosis

[Elfinablender]

I'm just at the very earliest stages of this so, if I offend anyone with my questions, could you attribute it to muddled shock rather than being a general shit?

I've just walked away from a parent consultation in which the teacher is looking to begin an assessment for my reception aged dc which, given the terms she is using, I suppose is along the lines of asd.

It's not that I don't agree with the behaviours which she has highlighted and how they could signpost to a diagnosis, I'm just not seeing a huge amount of benefit of going down that path for my dc. I have some questions that she wasn't able to answer and I was hoping to get some advice here.

So, firstly, how intrusive is the assessment process? When people use wooly language like "a diagnosis allows you to access resources", what actual resources are we looking at here, how helpful are they to my child - rather than say for my benefit or for the teachers? What actual tangible difference would it make to his school life?

Does having a diagnosis mean that you run the risk of having the breadth of your personality reductively shoehorned into a diagnosis by both yourself and others? Will the school continue to use words like 'fixated' and 'obsessed' in an unnecessary nod to a problem rather than 'interested in' or 'engaged in'? Will they stop seeing my dc past the diagnosis?

If it takes several years to get a diagnosis anyway, what's the big rush? What if he goes through all of this assessment for nothing?

Ellie I just wanted to thank you for some amazing posts on this thread.

OP I would just add that just knowing has made my son so much happier. It's made the world make sense to him. I don't think he could articulate why it's helped him so much - not even now at 9, and certainly not at 4. I've read similar sentiments from autistic people seeking assessments in adulthood. It's just nice to know there's a reason why XYZ (which your daughter probably can't name yet, but will one day) and it's not him/her/them being rubbish or stupid or weird.

Yeah Ellie - in the end my mum funded private speech therapy for us - and it's really making a massive difference because as we address her articulation problems it becomes more evident that she's got a language disorder thrown into the mix as well. I'm now applying to change career and train as a speech therapist myself (although I've a feeling I didn't do as well in the uni interview as I wanted to the other day and will need to be reapplying next year... but I do have a certain speech therapist happy to offer me shadowing experience as a result!)