Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello I am new to this and really need some help from any parents out there! I have a 9 year old daughter who we are concerned about. She displays some symptoms of Aspergers but not all. She can make eye contact and she isn’t sensitive to sound or light but she can’t interact socially, she doesn’t cry and can’t connect why someone would cry at a film because it isn’t real. She has limited emotional range. She was obsessed with dinosaurs aged 2 and could name them all, then it was sharks and now if we watch a film she is obsessed with what other films the actors have been in, how much money they earned from the film and if they are a “good” actor. She has never played with a single toy imaginatively. She builds Lego but then won’t play with it after at all. She wants to know what is happening that week and becomes anxious if things change. Everyday she has to know exactly what’s happening from getting up to bed. I told her we were going to a climbing centre one night and from that I had 15 questions about how long it would take to get there. How many climbing walls are there, what would be for tea there, what the harness looks like, if there is a helmet to be worn, how long we’ll be there. She has said that if she doesn’t have all her questions answered about anything they go round in her head as she tries to find the answers. She watches clocks to plan her time and wants to know when things like lunch are happening and then she plans activities or school work to fit in that time. It took her 2 years to learn to ride a bike. She can’t swim, can’t ice skate, can’t dance, can’t do monkey bars at play grounds. She has a tic with her eyes and sometimes has random outbursts of noises or body movements.
we are seeing the GP in the morning but I am just wanting to know if this sounds familiar to anyone.
please help me I feel my daughter is trapped feeling weird and not normal like everyone else and it’s breaking my heart.
Hello Sam
You may like to contact our Autism Helpline team who can provide you with information and advice . You can contact the team via telephone on 0808 800 4104 (Monday to Thursday 10am to 4pm, Friday 9am to 3pm). Please note that the Helpline is experiencing a high volume of calls and it may take a couple of attempts before you get through to speak to an advisor. Alternatively, should you prefer to send a message, you can do so via their webform:
https://www.autism.org.uk/services/helplines/main/questions.aspx
In addition you may like to contact our Parent to Parent service who offers emotional support to parents and carers of children or adults with autism. This service is confidential and run by trained parent volunteers who are all parents themselves of a child or adult with autism .
You contact the team on 0808 800 4106. Please leave a message and the team will call you back as soon as possible at a time that suits you, including evenings and weekends. Alternatively you can use contact the team via web form: https://www.autism.org.uk/services/helplines/parent-to-parent/enquiry.aspx
There are also general information pages on our website that may be of assistance to you.
I hope you find the above helpful.
Best wishes
Lorraine Mod
Thank you that’s exactly right she does show emotion but it is different to her sibling who has no symptoms of autism. I feel like this is overwhelming and I want to know how I can support her and how school can support because it seems without a piece of paper labelling her autistic no one cares or takes it seriously they just say some children are different and she’ll grow out of it. But it’s been like this all her life but we just put it down to her being clever and liking different things and she was quirky but it’s now becoming a problem for her and it’s more apparent.
I don’t use terms like weird and normal I’m saying that’s how my daughter feels. I just want to know if she fits with any other parents who have children with aspergers
It does sound familiar. Autism in girls is different mainly it is not the nature of interest but the intensity that is different. Knowing the plan for the day and asking thousand questions sounds very much like autistic anxiety. Concerning emotions, there is a misconception that autistic people don't have emotions, which is untrue. Auties are just showing the emotion differently, we are not 'performing' the emotion as neuroticalls expect.
It's not always a bad thing not to cry at films, self-control is useful sometimes.
See some of these things as skills, not deficits. They can be used in many areas of life and work, especially science.
Also get away from "weird" and "normal". It's that kind of thinking which has worked against people like me throughout our lives.