Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
I have a 10 year old son, who has just been diagnosed as having Aspergers, Friday 8th March. A year ago he was diagnosed as having sensory processing disorders. It has taken a long time for this diagnosis, we were first told he has social anxiety about 4 years ago.
I always knew it was more and kept notes of his behaviours. We got diagnosed as a result of me pushing for a speech and language therapist, first he had to have a hearing test which we found out he has hyper acuisis, after a thorough talk with peaditirician, she sent us to Occupational therapist who then diagnosed the SPD. we then went back to doctors who with him, the OT report and the school referred us to CAMHS. Over a year later we finally have a diagnosis.
My son has lots of worries and anxieties daily, has regular meltdowns at home (not school), struggles with friends are amongst some. The worries are so bad i have the same questions daily, he especially worries when not with me, where i am,what im doing, will i be on time, will i forget to pick him up etc.
If anyone has any support or ideas to help with the worries, it would be a great help. We do not know where we should go next or what we should do.
Any advice or help is greatly appreciated.
Hi, I really get where you are right now. My son was diagnosed aged 12, he's 18 now. Everything you describe in your post is so close to my son, exactly the same checking every day: would we pick him up from school on time, will x, y and z be the same. It became an obsessive thing to keep checking. His school was awful, had no SEN support and we ended up having to keep him home for three years. At school he was well behaved but massively anxious so he'd come home and just explode with stress, so we put his mental health first, as it was clear that the noise and crowds was too much for him.
The first thing to know is that it does get better, you will get there, but from my own experience can I suggest a few things that I wished I'd known a few years ago about ASD child anxiety?
1. Worries are his way of making sense of a bewildering world. They are just a symptom rather than a cause. I'd suspect that the more predictable, small-scale and routine his life becomes the more they will disappear. Rules that we think are obvious are not to him -- someone once described every day at school for such a child as being like trying to find a hotel in a foreign city when you don't speak the language and have no map. Stressful, basically.
2. If you can tackle this cause of his lack of control or understanding of his daily life and he enters a period of relative calm, then move to a longer term approach of using CBT methods which will root out unhelpful ways of dealing if stress before they take root. Otherwise he will get older and then suddenly return to worries when things change. I wished we'd done this with our son.
3. Allow all options to be on the table for you to ensure his world becomes what works best for him. For us, that meant withdrawal from school, initially against our wishes but eventually we found out that the county ed authority have a duty to educate him so we got funding for home tutoring. It could mean radical thinking, but I'd guess you're used to that so far.
4. Animals are great for lowering stress for ASD children. There is a non verbal thing that works. I wish I understood what it is. Horse riding, or helping out at stables or just having a dog etc.
5. It does get better. We've been to hell and back, maybe because we didn't know about things that could have helped, but now my son is a funny, interesting and sensitive chap because he's had all these challenges. You will get there too. Good luck.
Thanks so much, just knowing that other families have gone through something similar is great support.