How can you distinguish between language delay and ASD?

[nikos]

Wasn't quite sure how to title this. I've mentioned on the boards before that ds3 is being assessed for ASD. We have had the ADOS and DISCO questionnaire and in the words of the paed he 'doesn't tick many of the boxes for ASD' and 'he is a complex character'. His play therapist is also starting to doubt ASD as he has natural eye contact, a great desire to communicate. She also says 'he is a quandry'.
Ds has very good 1-1 support at his preschool and is coping really well, but probably wouldn't if he didn't. He interacts very well with his siblings but prefers to be on his own at preschool unless encouraged by support. He is a happy compliant boy unless out of his depth.
We are going for probably a diagnosis meeting in mid-November. I'm happy to have a provisional diagnosis of whatever if it gets him a statement and the support he needs for reception.
I suppose my concern is that if we treat it as ASD we might be missing something else. Anyone able to share experience/wisdom about this?

thanks lingle, well that's what happened with DH, we'll have to see if ds is the same.. might still have another couple of years to wait if that's the case!!

lol re discovering ears, I remember when ds figured out it was himself he was looking at in the mirror. Lots of funny expressions and turning to look at himself from funny angles. Not to mention his sudden fondness for bouncing naked in front of the mirror before bath time!!

Had our ed psych meeting today, which ended up being fairly short and sweet as we now aren't going down the statement route (at the moment at least), but will be keeping a close eye (through Early Action) for the foreseeable future.

She was very indoctrinated in expressing her starting school age views though, you wouldn't have liked it!! I asked about the potential rise to 5 as a starting age and she professed ignorance. In our area it is a flat no to starting reception at 5, although legally I can start him at 5, it would be straight into year one for him, which I don't feel would help.

tclanger, it's really interesting that your ds has this processing delay and mild autistic tendencies also. It sounds very similar to ds. Do you think your ds would ever have been dxed with SLI if you hadn't gone down the private route?

I'm open to someone arguing with me that it would be better for my particular child to start at 4.0 if they can come up with a reason other than "We'll make sure we punish you further down the line" which is the absolute essence of the "straight into year 1" argument.

That's what she said, the big crux of her argument was that theoretically ds1 could reach 16 before he takes his GCSE's and could therefore leave school without having the "full learning experience." The school should adapt to fit the child, not the other way round, according to her.

It's such bollocks. He is far more likely to succeed with GCSE's and enjoy school if we just give him the right start in the first place.

Got to go through all this with ds2 too, a mid Aug baby (how daft was I?) but hopefully the law may have changed before he reaches school age.

BTW, this is kt14 in disguise, have namechanged as realised I have practically given out my full address on MN in recent weeks, and am trying to preserve some anonymity. Plus my choice of nickname didn't help with that..!!

kt14 - really interested and pleased to hear about the progress your ds is making.

my own ds has had a sudden and very exciting leap in the past week. hardly any repetition, he's answering questions and even asking them, we are having proper little conversations and the sentences he is coming out with are not as stilted as they have been.

click! click!

the sound of things falling into place.

i've even stopped harassing the salt for an early appointment as i feel he is doing so well.

"It's such bollocks"

Eloquently put ex-KT, eloquently put.

I just knew you'd quote me on that bit!!!

and ragged robin, that is so great! Keep me posted on how he's doing.

The only questions we have are "where" ones at the moment. The SENCO report said he'd been answering q's at preschool though, such as "where are you going now?" "going outside" which I wasn't really aware he was doing.

It's his intent to communicate which has really given me hope. We've never had such normal eye contact and desire to show and tell me things. Both the SENCO and ed psych immediately commented on his desire to communicate when they met him this week.

Is there something in the air maybe?!

at kettlechip's 'something in the air'.

As mentioned earlier on in the thread, Ds2's preschool say he does not interact with other chilren there, although I have seen evidence of it when we are anywhere else. Well, yesterday morning he went running in saying 'hi' to the nursery nurse at the door and when he went to pick up his name sticker from the table, he turned to a little boy next to him and said 'hi, hi, hi' and smiled at him.
The nurses said that he had been very chatty that day, so yes, maybe there is something happening out there......

Hey!

Could you tell us more about your child?

eating habits?
sleep
behaviour
toe walking, flapping spinning maybe?
red ears/ cheeks? posturing? humping?

jane
x
DS 3 1/2 autism

the angle thing is interesting my son does this aged 6, he has been diagnosed with asd and developmental delay, his asd is quite minor, in fact some people have said he is not asd like the gentics team for instance, but his developmental delay is more severe and he leans to his side to look at things etc., and looks at reflections in a mirror or window for the tv, but is getting better on the dan protocol! please look up defeat autism now! which is at www.autism.com and treatingautism.com
he still only says 3 words but is able to lots more since we started in april with a dan docktor.
i am glad other kids look sideways at an angle and its not just my son......

Met with reception teacher and school nursery teacher today.

They apologetically told me they'd have to put DS2 on the SEN register to give him one to one language help. Using a puppet to learn body parts, etc. I told them no problem - I've been through that psychological loop already.

I braved telling the reception teacher that I don't want him to go to school in September at 4.0 and she immediately said she supported us and thought he needed another year. Phew. An important source of support. She said it's nothing to do with "holding back" or being "bright". A woman after my own heart. She knows DS1 well and it was good to tell her that DS1 had been the same as DS2 now is.

They are bringing in a specialist teacher to assess his understanding and the SALT is coming back in November.

It really is question time! Today on our train trip we had four questions in a row correctly answered! what's that animal? what does the sheep say? what's the next station? what's your name?

and he loved asking us all our names at dinner.

definitely something in the air.

How nice to have some positive things to say for a change! Hope this progress continues, it's a real treat after so much worry.

We're working on getting ds to say his name. He'll say who he is in a mirror, and names all of us but can't yet answer the question, "what's your name?" He answered when I asked which number house we lived at though. It's strange how some things click.

He's suddenly got the hang of body parts (the head, shoulders, knees and toes song is great for this), verbs - we had chew and dig today, and is spontaneously linking words, we had "door broken" when I wouldn't open the fixed shut wardrobe door for him to hide in..

The other rewarding thing about putting the work in with ds1 is how easily ds2 seems to be absorbing language through being around us. He obviously doesn't have ds1's language difficulties (at this stage anyway) and he amazes me with what he understands and says at 14 months.

Having said all of this, I am very relieved my pair of monkeys are finally in bed tonight. Their increased interaction has its downsides, and they seem to have wound one another up all afternoon. My ears are ringing

i really owe a huge thank you to this little group for all the support and advice i've had on these threads. i'm sure ds is making a lot more progress because i am so aware of his needs from chatting on here.

dd's hv came round today and was talking a bit about ds. she was talking about the nursery setting up 1:1 for him, so it's strange to read about lingle's psychological loop. not sure i've quite got my head around it, but if it will help then it has to be a good thing.

went to a consultation meeting re. ds's nursery. it is an excellent nursery, but the local authority are proposing to remove the head teacher and teacher and replace them with a nursery nurse, so i'm very disappointed. made my points (nervously!) and came home a bit flushed and rather shaky.... not good at these things!!

I'm a bit bruised myself this morning Ragged. I shouted at DH this morning because he talked over DS2, and DS1 and I were both nearly in tears with each other. Didn't sleep too well after yesterday's meeting, and maybe I hadn't been quite as thoroughly round that psychological loop as I'd thought

Ragged, are they planning to use the "time to talk" program at your nursery or something else? It's got to be a good thing to have 1:1 help.
Well done for going to that consultation meeting. It's all about being an advocate for the little ones....On a practical point, could you hope that even if the worst happens, the good practices already in place will carry on for a few years at least until your DS is at school? second best I know...

WhooHoo! about "door broken" KT. Ours sound almost like twins at the moment. I got "nice [Weeta]bix" today after saying it to him for about eleven months! Big desire to communicate plus those tantalising two-word phrases.....

ah - we had that on saturday. ds asked his daddy if nana was on the phone and rather than try to strike up a conversation with ds, daddy just said "no".

i asked, "can't you just pretend?" in an effort to improve communication in the house, but ended up with nobody talking for the rest of the day!!

i think we both know that 1:1 will be for the best, lingle, but it just makes the whole situation more real, doesn't it? which is odd, because it's practically all i've been thinking of for the past 6 months.

not sure what the nursery will have in place; they have had to postpone their open day because of the proposed closure. i shall ask about "time to talk". you are right though - ds is lucky in that the closure won't happen until aug 2009, so hopefully he will have settled in by then, and as you say, good practice should continue after that. the children who come after ds may not be so lucky, unfortunately.

This seems the best thread to put this on, but putting it on to show how far Ds1 has come with his language. A year ago this would have been nigh on impossible.
s294.photobucket.com/albums/mm89/bullet046/?action=view&current=newclothes002.fl v

s294.photobucket.com/albums/mm89/bullet046/?action=view&current=newclothes006.flv

Sorry, link not working. If you copy and paste it's the first two videos (called new clothes)

got it to work, bullet that's so amazing!!! You must be thrilled, he's so clear too.

In the spirit of sharing, have posted a couple of pics of the ds' on my page, but will probably take them off in a day or two, or I'll have to come up with a new name again.
Which might not be a bad thing, this one keeps making me hungry

Loving that talking bullet. My DS sounds at about the same level and he's 4.6. Its so lovely when they can talk to you like this isn't it. We still have huge amounts of babble too though.

I'm going to try and get this a bit more on topic, so what do people think would definitely rule out an ASD? It seems diagnosis will vary from place to place. Some of thechildren described with LD on here, I think would be assessed for ASD in my area.
So what would be the markers for no ASD? Is desire to communicate enough?

I'm not sure - DS1 (ASD) is obsessed with communicating whatever he wants to communicate ! If he sees an elephant on TV or wherever, he comes running to get me so that I can share the experience and be told 10 million times that it is a big elephant.

Bullet's Video clip is great ! The speech is so clear I'm very envious. DS1 here repeats my words more often now and uses them in context - 'See you soon' whenever someone leaves and 'Hurry Up Quickly Now' if we stuck in a queue.

Love the 'KettleCrumb' in Ugg boots too !

What would definitely rule out an ASD? Difficult. It's a whole cluster of things, so just about anything can be present or absent, if enough of the rest of the things are still there. The more they think they understand exactly how to diagnose an ASD, the more they realise they actually don't. It's why there's a very very long consultation going on with the USA DSM V classification. Might not know the full answer until 2010 and I can guarantee they'll fight over that new answer, too.