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NHS referral for Autism assessment. What to tell my 10yr old child

sunwillshine

Hello everyone. First time I have posted on here so please forgive me if I am asking a question that has been answered several times before.

We have been going through the autism process for several months now & after filling in several forms(and long periods of silence) we have finally recieved a letter offering an appointment to see a consultant Paediatrician who specialises in autism. The appointment is for ourselves and our daughter and the letter states the appointment will last approx 2 hours.

I have read previous forum posts regarding what to tell your child AFTER diagnosis but wanted to ask what parents told their children prior to the assesment? I have no idea what the appointment will entail or whether autism will be mentioned to my daughter as this is something that we have never discussed directly.

Many thanks in advance for any advice. 

  • oh btw! sorry my son is 9 so around the same age as your daughter.  (sorry also first time on this site!!!).

  • I am also going through this process.  We were referred after attending a 'worries' course run by CAHMS.  I told my son we were going to talk to someone about his worries, who could help more.  He was amazed there was a whole place just for children and their worries!! I explained that this was a place for children with all sorts of difficulties, he's quite intellegent so he understood that.

    However, they weighed and measured him,[be ready for that with your daughter too] and the next morning at breakfast, he said, 'how come if we were getting help with my worries they needed to weigh me?.  ERK so some quick thinking and something I'd read on this site, and I bluffed it a bit saying that sometimes bodies grow differently and then brains work differently as well, and they needed to check this out with him.

    we've talked a little about how some people's brains do work differently, and that they might need extra help to understand things that other people find easier to understand.

    I guess you need to thing about why this process started, what difficulties did your daughter have, and what she would understand, without going into too much detail.

    At our first appointment (although I understand it can be different) they asked about his history, his birth, any medical problems, and then went through the classic autism difficulties, and asked me what I thought, and I gave examples, eg he shows no empathy and I could give a really good example.  They also chatted to him, he made us laugh as he said 'my favourite hobby is writing lists' as he sat there with his notebook and the sports pages writing out the results in nice neat lines!!!!! 

    So i guess, don't worry too much, but think about examples and problems you might want to talk about, and take something for your daughter to do, perhaps esp. if you are going to be there for 2 hours. (they said 1 hour for us and it was about 40mins) but we are now waiting for a second appointment to see speech and language and a specialist paediatrician, and I guess your appointment might be all of that together.

    Good luck!