ASD that 'disappears' in the holidays

[Egede]

My 6 yo DS has just been diagnosed with Asperger's. I've been slightly unconvinced from the beginning, mostly because he can use metaphor, imagine things from other people's point of view, anticipate other people's feelings and recognise non-verbal cues some of the time, although at other times, and during assessment, he presents a fairly classic set of behaviours. He's been struggling socially in school and was badly bullied last term, which the school is not handling convincingly. But his 'ASD' vanished during the holidays and he was mature, sociable, able to behave appropriately in groups, sensitive and generally the person we knew before he started school. DH has just been made redundant and we're considering home-schooling - are we burying our heads in the sand?

Who diagnosed him?

Consultant community paediatrician and the SALT team, referral suggested by the school SENCO and a friend who is an ed psych. By mid-term, it's all highly convincing and none of them have seen him in the holidays.

my dd 5 has adjd and aspergers and odd. She is definately worse atwhen at school and the behaviour spills out at home. i also think that during holidyas she is generally better but there are sometimes still some indicators there. I think that school is just an anxious environment for them that it highlights the issues more. Her noise sensitivity issues are still there at home but certainly the angry behaviour etc that occurs at school is much less prominent if at all. I think this behaviour is said to be a reaction to overstimuous/anxiety etc. Im thinking about home edding but at the momen ti think she is getting something from school. I might see how she goes and suggest a 3 day school week if they will accommodate it and see if this will provide a balance.

I'm worried that if he does have ASD and we pull him out of school, he won't learn to deal with group and community life at all, which would limit the eventual fulfilment of his academic abilities. He has an on/off friendship with one child and is otherwise, and unhappily, solitary. He loves the 'work' at school and does very well at everything that doesn't require fine motor skills but the place makes him miserable and aggressive and hard to live with.

from what i understand home edding doesnot have to ve solitary. There are a lot of he groups which meet up regularly and there are other activites which you can do which will keep him in the community (it doesnt mean you have to stay at home all day). A lot of asd children do go back into mainstream school as they get older as they do mature and learn coping mechanisms - in fact from what i've reaad they often ask to go back.

my ds1 has dyspraxia, not asd, but also has social difficulties and a lot of asd type behaviors. It is def much worse dfuring school term. I've had two weeks of him being lovely and wondering if I completely made up everything I wrote on his dla form. Now he has gone back to school he is a nightmare again.
I put it down to tiredness and stress.

With everything being so much harder for a child with sn at school, I think it can all get too mcuh for them. I'm not sure I'd take him out of school though, for the reasons you said. The school needs to do more. I was loaned a book called the autistic handbook published by the national autistic society which has some really good stuff on how to deal with bullying.

What helped my son regards bullying is when the classes were rearranged in the new school year and the new group he was in didn't have so many 'alpha males' as one parent called it. (Basically spoilt, boisterous brats!)

It's a small school with one class per year. The headteacher, although she had to accept that the bullying was happening because there were witnesses (he was being beaten up in the bushes in the playground every day and didn't tell us for weeks), keeps saying that 'the children at this school are very good at accepting difference' and 'we don't have bullying here.' I've called them alpha males as well, boisterous boys who act as if they're the masculinity police. Girls won't play with boys and there just don't seem to be any other bookish boys with science-geek interests. We're moving in the summer so there's no point in changing schools, but we're increasingly wondering about filling the gap with six months home ed now DH is around in the day anyway.

I have one boy who gets worse during the holidays (change to routine etc) and one who gets a lot better.

I think when they're at home it can be a lot easier for them to take a step back when things are getting too much. They can go off and hide under a blanket or go wild on the trampoline if that's what helps them to calm down. So in that respect I wouldn't say that the diagnosis was definitely wrong, although obviously I don't know your ds at all.

I would also say that the other things wouldn't necessarily rule out AS either. My 8yr-old can manage many of those things but is definitely autistic. I would say that the big difference in that respect between my ds and NT children is that he had to learn how to do those things gradually over the years rather than being able to do them automatically.

I don't have experience of HE but I wouldn't have thought that HE'ing would prevent him from learning social skills etc. If anything it might help take some of the pressure off him a little, especially if he's been/being bullied at school. Another MNer on here HE'd her ds with AS for several years (although in the time it's taken me to post this she might already have posted on this thread ).

Egede,

Sympathies. It's hard when the professionals don't see the child you know isn't it?

The head of the "best" school in my town has also told parents that there is no bullying when there is. The school is in denial and may not learn very much in the next 6 months.

It sounds as though it could be good for you as a family to take him out but link up with other "science geeks" he can hang out with via the home ed. network.

DS1 has no diagnosis but some mild AS traits, which are always more prevalent at the beginnings and ends of terms and disappear completely in the holidays. The most obvious are: difficulties in getting off to sleep ("brain whirring")
muddled /convoluted speech
lack of patience/'short fuse'
lots of pacing and fidgeting
He sounds quite similar to your son in the things he can do.

His social life at school was always slightly awkward (he played with the 'Beta males' but didn't really enjoy their games and was always on the periphary) until last year when he became best friends with a girl who, tbh, is very similar to him but a lot more feisty! She's about 3ft tall but apparently protects him from the rougher boys. He's also become friends with a boy who has mild AS and they talk computers all the time. If these children weren't in the class I think our situation would be very different.

I've always invited children home to play - with great trepidation at times - and I think this has helped too. I've helped DS1 to plan what he's going to do with them before they arrive - and made sure that some of the activities are things that mean they'll want to come again. A bit manipulative maybe - but it seems to work!

We part time HE our second son, who has severe autism, so have had experience of both.

Thanks to everyone who posted! We had a meeting with the headteacher, SENCO and his class teacher on Fri, which had good bits - they were willing to be told that they need to help him develop social skills as well as protect him from the consequences of not having any - and bad bits ('frankly, [ds1] is the kind of child who would thrive so much more in the private system.' As if I didn't know that, and as if the fact that I work means we can afford school fees because obviously a woman's income is just for extras...)They've agreed to try a few of my ideas to help him to settle, but meanwhile I tried a practice home-schooling afternoon at the weekend, without telling ds1 that's what it was, and found that it was really hard to juggle ds1's urgent need to tell me everything he knows about the foreign policy of Phillip II of Spain with 2yo ds2's urgent need to dance around the kitchen to Old MacDonald. I'm not sure one adult can meet both sets of needs all the time, but equally not sure, after frantic hysteria at the school gates this morning (ds1 not me) I can keep forcing him to go. I'm finding this really hard, and meanwhile I need to stay focussed at work because I'm horribly aware that my income is now all we've got.

Hmm, many of the special needs board have fought for additional 1-to-1 support for their children so someone experienced may show up in a minute to offer more help.

Is DS2 in nursery at all? When does he turn 3? Will be qualify for playgroup any time soon? Does he still nap? Will he go quiet in the buggy?