Early Development Questionnaire

I'm experiencing a similar issue with my parents. They are both introverted people and I suspect that my dad is also on the spectrum but more so than me. I am finding that I'm needing to teach them about autism before moving onto approaching what I have been asking of them.

Yesterday whilst discussing the early development form I sensed that they thought that I was being overly 'precious' in wishing to go for an assessment so I shared some of the darker MH stuff about my life (past eating disorder and suicidal thoughts) that I had planned on keeping from them. Thankfully they seem to take this on board and by the end of the conversation, there was a greater sense of willingness about completing the form. 

Luckily I have a sister, older, who can also provide information and I hope to ask her to complete an ED form and adapted AQ-50 for relatives as mentioned in a recent research article that I found (tried to find the link to post here. Unable to locate at the moment). 

On the AQ-10 my score is too low, however, on the  AQ-50 I score 33 so would fall in the seek an assessment / borderline ASC diagnostic range. 

I hope that there will be enough information from all sources to be taken seriously. 

Yeah exactly, I had books to read and computers to tinker with, way more interesting than adult nonsense!

That's just how I was.  I understood the polite formalities and that I was expected to answer a few questions about how I was doing at school etc.  But hanging around with a bunch of people talking in what might as well have been a foreign language when my latest Lego project was crying out for my attention? No way!

Thanks, well my sister is coming along with me in the day to be asked questions, the trouble is she's 6 years older than me and has already said she can't really remember anything about our childhood, and I don't really have anything to do with her or the rest of my family as an adult, so not entorent sure how much help shell be. Her daughter though is being assessed for autism and has many of the issues I now deal with

Early developmental delay is not the only thing to look at - my mum completed the questionnaire in much the same way, as she did not observe any delay. The key thing here is that she didn't notice if I was delayed in social ability...because my mum is incredibly like me i.e. probably is also on the spectrum, so "not wanting to interact much with others" was normal behaviour from her perspective. I did then get them to send the questionnaire to my sister, who is no way on the spectrum. That really helped because she had a better view of what I did that was "normal" and what was not, when we were growing up together. So, don't be afraid to get other family members to fill in the questionnaire too, it will most likely help your case.

Thanks for that, very helpful. Funny you should say that, one thing she did say was I was a good child, I never caused them any problems. Very polite when visitors came but then I dissapared out of the way

This can be split into two questions:

Can an autistic child hit development milestones at typical ages?

Yes, that's quite possible. Autistic traits are incredibly variable from person to person, some things may develop slightly later, some might be typical, and some might even be hit precociously early. For example, one of the distinctions between "classic" autism and Asperger's Syndrome is that language is not significantly delayed in Asperger's Syndrome (though other traits might be.) Also, during our early development, we are unaware that the way our brain processes the world is different to most other people - it is our "normal". So it's possible to have externally observable behaviours which seem perfectly typical, because we have adapted to our environment, yet we're achieving this by very different methods than would be typical.

What were your Mother's expectations?

To give you an example. At my assessment, I discovered that I learned to walk without ever crawling first and walked exclusively on tip-toe; my speech was delayed, but when I started speaking it was already in grammatical phrases; I rarely cried out to be fed or from discomfort as an infant; I learned to read precociously early (hyperlexia). My Mum, bless her, just thought she had hit the jackpot; the horror stories from other parents about crawling infants wrecking the place and sleep lost to incessant screaming meant nothing to her. I was such a "good baby"!

I now know, in part thanks to the assessment, that my Mum has many autistic traits herself, and her younger brother, who she often cared for as a child, is uncannily like me. To her, I seemed perfectly normal, and my later academic performance at school seemed to confirm this. Yet her factual observations about my development at my assessment show clear signs of early autistic development - she just had no reason to think they were unusual while I was growing up nor to point them out to anyone else.

I'm not trying to suggest that your Mum is also autistic, just that parents often lack the knowledge or experience to pick out traits that might indicate autism, especially if they are not disruptive, are particularly subtle, or are being masked by the autistic child learning their own coping strategies. It's also easy to assume other explanations for autistic behaviours; shyness being the obvious example.