Hello,

So many of you have been kind enough to offer your opinions about what I have been seeing with my son. I'm still feeling like everyone thinks I'm the crazy dad right now.

My son is 18 months old (was 5 weeks premature) and is receiving Early Intervention, Speech Therapy, and has seen a Developmental Pediatrician twice (same one twice). They are all saying that they believe that DS is not on the spectrum. The developmental pediatrician went as far as to say he is "the poster child for an NT kid". But I still don't agree and I don't know what else I can do, so I would like to get some opinions.

Positive Things

* Good receptive language (will point to objects and people when named, will go get shoes or a book if you ask him to,

*Points to indicate wants, and maybe things of interest (but not often)

* Decent self help skills- eats with spoon, will try to put shoes on (he can't but he tries),

* Will play chase games- If I go hide he will come and find me

* Plays appropriately with toys (talks on fake phone once in awhile, pushes toy car and makes vrooom sound)

Worrisome Things

* Still zero eye contact when he is being held- Pretty good from a distance though

* No real words yet ( kind of says outside when he wants to go out, calls me and mom both dade, signs more for everything even when we haven't given him something initially. But he doesn't seem to initiate any words- he will sometimes try to repeat things that we say though.

* He does spin sometimes- Is this normal for a kid his age from time to time? My wife gets mad and says he's a kid and he just learned to do it and it's fun- I've never seen him do it for longer than 2 minutes

*He does flap his arms but only when he really wants something or he is excited and he is usually making eye contact and smiling when he does this

*He seems to zone out quite a bit which I don't know if that's normal or not?

*Shakes his head no constantly- almost think it's a stim- he gets that it means no but sometimes does it even when we haven't asked him a question. He doesn't know how to shake his head for yes yet.

*Has never been a cuddler- doesn't like to nap with us or anything.

That's enough for now. I would be grateful if you would be willing to share your opinion with me and please be as honest as possible. If you think I'm being crazy, please tell me. Thanks so much.

John

Spinning for less than two minutes doesn't sound worrisome to me, either. Stuff like that only becomes a problem when it takes over his life... which it obviously hasn't.

There are some autistic features there; lack of eye contact and stimming. But that's not all there is to autism; he doesn't seem to be near as disconnected when it comes to communicating and relating to others, despite the speech delay.

When a child has autistic features but not autism, some of the same things used to help autistic kids could be useful to him. So exploring this avenue, and the possible help it can give your child, is by no means useless.

He sounds very normal to me. I have four children age 15months to 8 years. They didn’t do much more than that at 18 months. My normal children don’t have eye contact or choose to pay attention to me and they are very intelligent, they are just self-absorbed like most average children or even adults. Who listens very well anyways! Most people can’t wait until you shut up so they can say what they want to say, they just learned how to be polite and act like they are listening. To tell you the truth I would be delighted and tickled to death if my 6 year old Autistic boy did almost any of the things you mentioned. Not saying your gut instinct is wrong. He could still be on the Spectrum. But my advice I give everybody is educate in all ways possible and make it fun. That is the best a parent can do no matter what diagnosis your child has. Learn from the professionals. If I can’t sit in while my child has speech therapy I ask my child’s therapist to give me learning materials she is working on so we can practice at home. Our child’s speech therapist has become one of my best teachers and friends.