Early Development Questionnaire

Hi all

Well im on the waiting list for assessment, due in November sometime - so not too bad.  As part of it they have sent a early development questionnaire for my mum to complete.  It was quite interesting, her answers basically outlined me being a loner, not looking or needing friends and never communicating if i was upset or ill.  She noted though that development wise i was on par with what she would expect, such as learning to talk/walk at the normal times etc.  Just wondered if this is consistent with the spectrum?

Thanks

Parents
  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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!

Reply
  • 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!

Children