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Worried about my grand-daughter

NAS61923

My Granddaughter (GD) is two in the next few weeks. Her homelife is difficult as her parents sometimes row and her mother is diagnosed with several mental health issues. During her pregnancy was very stressed and took anti-depressents. My GD birth was long and laboured and her mum coped the best she could. At first My GD was fine fed well, slept well in fact was a angelic baby.  Two of my sons show traits of the autistic spectrum but are undiagnosed. 

My concern started at about 4-5 months her development with sitting up was very late in fact she was almost 6-7 months. She was about 16 months when she finally walked. Crawling was very slow. Her speech is very poor and even now rarely used single words to express her feelings. She has some but not many.  She does babble but nothing makes conectable words or sentences. Not all the words are said only a syllabol or two. She does walk on tip toes, wave her hands and loves to make herself dizzy. 

My main concern though is her social and emotional side. I have been around her all this time and she never outwardly responds to me when I come into the room. Nor does she with other family or her granddad. We all spend time playing and talking to her but when we go nothing, when we arrive no acknowledgement. She doesnt respond all the time to her name she is getting better since nursery. Nursery have expressed concerns regarding her development. She has passed a hearibg test with no issues. 

Here comes the tough part, social services are sadly involved and instead of seeing this as possible early signs of another issue they have said its purley down to stress. My daugter in law did bring ASD up but my son refused to discuss this. I want to help to put my concerns forward as her parents work so hard to provide a stable happy home its just for them SS put so much stress on them that is causes problems. My main worry is that all this is diverting from my GD and her needs are not being looked at. 

Any advice on how to proceed with approaching her HV or even my son would be appreciated.

Thanks 

  • Hi, sorry to hear this.  My daughter was late diagnosed age 10 and was late sitting and walking.  We found out she was hypermobile which also affects many other things.

    Could you maybe suggest to your daughter and son in law they have a pediatrician take look at her to look for other reasons for the delays she is having? 

  • Hi, 

    I'm really sorry about the struggles your family is facing, social services can be very single minded in that once they have an idea as to why a child is behaving a certain way they will rarely consider anything else. I to had issues with them claiming my daughters traits were due to stress in the home, I was lucky in that pre-school supported my opinions and health visitor pointed out that nothing was seen in other children so it probably wasn't stress!, that said the trauma of having to constantly justify everything and having everything questioned really took its toll on us. It also delayed my daughter being seen by peadiatrics, in fact we are still trying to get her assessed (she is 8 now social services were involved when she was 2 and a half)

    Moving forward, you have said your son is reluctant to consider asd it might be worth showing him some of the information on this site showing the positive side to autism alot of people get stuck on the stereotypical image of autism and don't know the complexity of it and the different ways it can present, 

    You said nursery have raised concerns regarding development, if you have contact with them maybe raise the possibility with them. There is alot of info on the site that you can take and show them, if they also start confirming that they suspect asd social services are more inclined to listen to them than parents. 

    If your daughter in law is agreeable I would suggest that she makes an appointment with the gp for your granddaughter to request assessment, if you went with her you could support her listing all the traits you mentioned above. 

    The nas helpline will also be able to give you advice 

    Good luck