Expert: Trey McGowan - 1/5/2008

Question
My son just turned 3 in December.  He is showing high intelligence in the area of letters, numbers, words, and music.  For months now he can recognize all of the alphabet, both upper and lower case, as well as his numbers 1 - 10 in any order. Also, before his 3rd birthday he was recognizing words on sight, (e.g. Sun, X-ray, Queen, Our, and more).  Now to my concern, he walked on his toes most of the time from 12mos. (when he started walking) until now.  He is using 2 and 3 word sentences but hums a lot.  He answers to his name and can tell me his name when I point to him in a picture but when I ask him his name he just repeats the question back to me.  This is true of most of our communication.  I ask a question and he echoes it back...unless he says no! He is very intelligent and advanced in educational areas beyond his 4 yr old classmates and he is socially involved and plays appropriately with toys.  It's his lack of communication abilities and humming/toe walking stereopathies that are my concern.  What are your thoughts?

Answer
Hello, Maisha!

First and foremost, I know I've said it before but I like to make sure it's said again just in case: I'm not a doctor, so anything I say here won't be as helpful as an actual doctor's comments.

Now, in reading over your descriptions, I have to admit that it sounds as if there is the possibility of a high-functioning ASD, possibly Asperger's Syndrome or PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified; not as scary as it sounds, I promise!). Of course, bringing him to a psychologist or speech therapist would be better for being able to ID it for certain, but as you yourself said, there's some fairly common stereotypies that he's showing.

Now that the big scare is out of the way, I have a feeling that, from what you're saying here, he is quite high functioning, and the main issues are the communication ones. Therefore, I highly suggest speaking with your local pediatrician or family doctor about Early Intervention in your area. They will be able to hopefully help with the communication issues and be able to better judge how far behind (or beyond!) his peers your child is. Without knowing where you are, I can't direct you to local sites directly, but hopefully the doctors, or your own research, will be able to help find what you need.

For the rest, the fact that he's socially involved suggests to me that having peers around is probably one of the best things for him. If there are no issues in actual schooling, I suggest keeping him with the others, so he can continue to develop social skills from his own age group. In addition, being around others his own age (and near it) will possibly help naturally develop his communication skills as he sees and imitates them. Keep an eye on it, though: communication difficulties can lead to frustration on the part of either side, and frustration can lead to lashing out.

So in short, speak with a doctor about Early Intervention (or at least a therapist who can diagnose and treat whatever difficulties there may be), and in the meantime keep doing what you've been doing: being a great parent to a smart, if a little eccentric, young man.

If you have any other questions, comments, follow-ups, et cetera, feel free to ask!

Trey