This is the first in a series of articles about our personal journey with autism. What we went through, what we learned, and how it might help you.
Now the first thing I should mention is that we have multiple children on the autism spectrum. Each one is different. Not only in their personalities, and how autism affects them, but also in how they learn, what they are capable of, and how we can interact with them.
Even though we have walked the path before, each experience is unique. This means that no one person may know exactly what you are going through. We are here to help guide, but understand that your path will also be uniquely yours.
We all walk a similar path, but each person has to walk their own path.
The most unique to us was our first son, as we had very limited experience with Autism at the time. Everything we knew was from how it was portrayed on TV and from our niece, who was autistic. She was about 5 years old at the time, and about 2 years older than our son. We didn’t think our son could be on the spectrum, as he had already progressed further than she had – at least so we thought we were on target.
We did think that our son misbehaved a lot. He seemed to never listen to us, and was easily excitable. However, we chalked it up to the terrible twos and trying threes as my mother liked to call them.
When our son was three, we had an opportunity to place our child in preschool. Unbeknownst to us at the time, they did some simple testing on each of their students to make sure each child was at the appropriate age level of development. They were not testing for autism, just to make sure each child was ready for their next step.
When the school director asked us to come in to review the test results, we didn’t know what to expect. I’ll always remember sitting in that meeting, as it was the school director who did the testing, gave us the results. I remember sitting there in her office, shaking my head, not wanting to believe her.
Our happy, communicative son, who spoke twice as many words as his older autistic cousin, was being recommended for testing for autism and we were told we should expect that he is on the spectrum.
Looking back, there were lots of signs that we missed. Signs we didn’t even know to look for.
As our first child, we didn’t really have anything to measure against, and only had one niece, which we didn’t see often enough to make a determination. We didn’t understand how autism is a spectrum disorder, and so each person with it will affect them a little – to a lot – differently.
The things we missed were, that you might want to look out for, include:
- Not responding to his name when we called him,
- Him not looking at us when we talk to him,
- Getting overly upset at loud noises,
- Not talking at an appropriate age level, (this is difficult if you don’t have other children to see how they are progressing)
- Responding in frustration to situations (which may seem like temper tantrums).
In reality, we thought we had a kid who wasn’t well behaved. Looking back, we now know otherwise.
We didn’t realize that autism was a spectrum, and every person is different. We’d only seen extreme cases, and it caused a lot of doubt. Our child did not act like other cases, real or fictional that we had seen so it was easy to be in denial and not even want to look closer and further at our son’s actions to see if they were correct. While we hesitated to have our son tested, we went ahead with the plan, knowing that it would come back false, and we could keep going on – boy, were we wrong.
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