Tl;dr: Speech therapy appears to be a stressful environment for parent and child that brought out the worse aspect of DS's behaviour. Is the 'diagnosis' therefore accurate and how concerned should we be?
Yesterday DW took our 3yo DS (will turn 3 years old next month) to a speech and language therapy service.
We requested a referral way back in February when we really felt DS's speech was not coming on much at all and he was hitting us, occasionally other children and also banging his head on the floor when was frustrated. DS has an obsession with sliding doors and he gets very upset when he is taken away from one. DS also lives in a bilingual home (Spanish and English) and is able to fully understand instructions in both languages, but has limited vocabulary in both.
Since that time, DS's speech has really come on, he still only uses no more than three words at a time but he has a range of vocabulary and sounds, is improving each day and his overall behaviour is improving (no head banging at all anymore and the hitting is much reduced). The obsession with sliding doors still remains a challenge though.
So, when DW attended the therapy session, we were shocked to discover this diagnosis: Disordered development in the areas of attention, listening, play, social communication and language.
The entrance to the centre has a sliding door, so DS was already crying and hitting when DW took him away from that into the therapy room. It took a while to console him, but perhaps gave a false impression to the therapists that DS is more erratic than he otherwise is.
From that stressful starting point, the therapists then engaged in play with DS while asking DW (now very stressed and overwhelmed) a whole bunch of questions. They found that DS did not engage in eye contact consistently when being talked to, did not engage with roleplay (they asked him to comb a toy's hair), and was fixated with a small range of toys, rather than moving form one toy to another. On this basis the above diagnosis was given, a referral for autism screening was made, and further monitoring will be scheduled.
I have serval issues with this:
- DS entered the session upset, saw that his Mummy was also upset with the therapists and then was expected too immediately play with total strangers in a room he has never been in. Of course he would not make eye contact with them as frequently. We have never noticed any issues with lack of eye contact before, and neither have nursey staff where he has attended for 8 months.
- The roleplay activity was a hair combing exercise that DS has never done before. He engages with plenty of roleplay at home (cooking, feeding hi toys with a spoon etc.)
- "Disordered development" is a very vague term and different from having a specific development disorder like Asperger's. When I asked what this term means, what might have caused it and how can we improve I was told they don't really know and we just have to continue what we are doing. So it feels like a lot of worry and stress for something out of our hands.
Does anyone have experience of such a diagnosis, or similar behaviours in their child?
How indicative of a longer-term/permanent development need is this?