I am a single parent of two children, I have Asperger's Syndrome and was diagnosed at age 6. My son will be 2 years old next month and I believe he is autistic, but because of his young age nobody is listening to me and i'm getting very little support. All i'm being told is "he will grow out of it." Has anyone else experienced this?
My son was born with colic - he screamed and screamed from the minute he was born until he was three months old, sometimes for 6 hours on end without sleeping or feeding. As a newborn he slept about 6-8 hours a day. When he was about 9 months I noticed it was very difficult to sustain eye contact with him, and at 15 months I was convinced he couldn't hear because he spent all day in a world of his own and paid attention to absolutely nothing else. Turns out his hearing is perfectly fine.
Currently he has no language. He occasionally imitates words but it can take me up to half an hour to get him to imitate one word - and even then he only repeats the last sound. He doesn't interact with other children at all (barely even acknowledges them), doesn't appear to understand the majority of what I say to him but does recognise certain key words like "juice," "dinner" and "bed." He very rarely makes eye contact, he has never used any form of body language (waving, pointing, clapping etc) and he still wont, despite me giving him a lot of encouragement to do so, and his only form of communication is squealing and crying. He hasn't got a clue how to let me know what he wants or needs. He has tantrums which involve a lot of repeated head banging and recently he has become aggressive during a tantrum, hitting and kicking and no matter what technique I use it takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour to calm him down and figure out what the problem was. He is extraordinarily fussy with food - all he will eat is toddler tray meals, bananas and occasionally toast. He staged a five day long hunger strike at 20 months old when I attempted to get him to eat anything else. He plays with exactly the same toys in exactly the same order every day. He stacks blocks, stacks legos, stacks books, and if he can't stack it he lines them up. When he plays, he is in a world of his own - he doesn't listen (unless you say "dinner" or "juice"), or appear to acknowledge anything else at all.
He has recently been assessed has having a severe speech delay. The results of his assessment show he has the speech capabilities of a 6 month old and he is very nearly 2 years old. He also has a global delay including visual, manipulation and language but this is not quite as severe - here they've put him between 12-15 months. All his traits line up with the signs of autism in children, and because i'm on my own and I have an older daughter to look after aswell I have virtually no support from anyone. My family think i'm "jumping the gun," professionals i've seen think he will just "grow out of it" but children's services think its my fault that he has such a severe delay and that it must be down to poor parenting! My older daughter is 5 years old, and has no problems at all. She's very intelligent and does well at school, popular with her classmates, not particularly fussy with food, doesn't have any of the traits my son displays at all - and she had the same parenting.
Ok so this post turned into a bit of a rant and rave. I have nobody to talk to. So if you've read it all, what do you think? Does it sound like autism? And is it possible to get a diagnosis at 2-3 years old? Because i'm at the end of my tether and I really need support.
