Expert: Paul Johnson - 1/27/2010

Question
My daughter has severe dyspraxia oral and motor, also dysarthria. She has been assessed as moderate learning disabilities.She is now 6.8 years old and recent reports calculated her age at 3yrs.
Her speech is really problematic, as people cannot understand what she is trying to say.Nearly all beginning and endings of words are missing etc and she gets words in the wrong order etc. I have recently observed her at play at school where she is often on the 'outside' of her peers. She has problems sleeping. She also cannot tolerate anyone being affectionate with me (mother)and has great difficulty concentrating.She tends to fiddle with her fingers/hands at quiet times or maybe when she is anxious.She tends to jump from one subject to another and can be obsessive about a certain colour or topic even obsessive about bags and likes to put many things inside then take them out and put in another bag etc.She also struggles with certain types of humour and this upsets her.She often takes things literally, i.e if you said, "after we read a story we will go and play" she would get up as if she was going to play.She absolutely hates having her hair brushed or anything touching her head, so we avoid brushing her hair as it causes so much upset.Also has a massive dislike of the noise of the hoover, which started about 2.5 yrs ago.I am sick and tired of our local nhs stating they are looking into whether she is Autistic, all i want is to find out so i can ensure that everyone who knows and works with Louise can start to understand her more and utilize new strategies to help her.Hope you can help, thanks.

Answer
Hey Paula,

I will start at the same point where you started. I think the point of entry for the treatment of Louise is with communication. I would recommend that you have her examined by a speech therapist or pathologist to ascertain what is causing her speech issues. It seems to me that is the biggest area of concern. Choose a speech therapist that has a good understanding of Autism. If the clinician thinks it is Autism then begin to seek services through their referral. If there is an issue in another area then you would know and get be able to address it with an early intervention.

I think your resistance is because you might be suspicious of the Autism but the professionals are reluctant to begin their examination of a child with the goal of ruling out Autism. Autism is something they do not wish to discover because of the pain anticipated of sharing the news with the family. So begin with the speech deficit as the issues and see where it goes.