Mom says I had no symptoms as a child

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How many parents several generations ago, before the advent of Asperger's as a diagnosis, knew about autism and what to look for ? Wouldn't more subtle presentations often fly under the parental radar?
After a certain amount of time how good is a parent's recollection of their child's behaviour ?

I am a child of the late 50s to mid 70s. My parents never , as far as I know, considered autism or any autistic behaviour. However this was pre the broadening of things with the establishment of Asperger's as a diagnosis. I think I was in my mid 30s when it became an official dx (early 90s ?)

When I was a kid asd/asperger's wasn't even a diagnosis. If you didn't have full autism your quirks were written off, so they were. It was a different time. Now parents are hyper-aware to look out for any symptoms of autism. That generation of parents a good percentage of parents still may not be well educated on the autism spectrum because they don't need to be. I didn't experience many adverse signs when I was a child except for the shyness, but into middle school and on I became more and more a misfit to society, so the social aspect has been by far the biggest negative factor as well as anxiety.

I agree it is pretty hard to find symptoms in photos, but I think it is possible. In my old photo albums we had descriptions of what I was doing which helped. Basically, I looked for things like stimming, flat affect, not looking interested in the environment, lining up or grouping toys, and I also looked at my developmental history, where I rolled over late, I crawled late, I was late to do jumping jacks/catch a ball, etc.

I think your smiling thing could very well be a trait. You seem a lot like my little sister, and she at the very least has traits of autism (a lot of people in my family are autistic). I think it could be a trait because Tony Attwood mentions it in his book The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome (which is a great read if you haven’t already heard of it by the way), and it is hard for people with Asperger’s to “fake” an emotion that they are not feeling.

I think your description of the forts you made as a child and sleeping with stuffed animals is also a trait. It seems as if you had those things as coping mechanisms to deal with an overwhelming world, which is very commonly seen in autism.

I have the same problem as you where I can’t remember stimming at a young age. When I looked back at my childhood however, I did find evidence of stimming. Since it gets worse under stress, I didn’t stim much as my younger childhood wasn’t particularly stressful. Remember, not every symptom has to be present in the early developmental period. There just has to be some evidence of impairment before the age of 8 or so. I don’t remember having such bad sensory issues when I was little either, but that is also a trait of mine that worsens under stress. As you get older, you get more stress which=more or different behaviors.

Good luck with interviewing you mom!

Only problem is they are so low to the ground, each year it gets harder and harder to fit underneath

When I was little, my Mom made me a small tent that fits over a card table. It was awesome

First, your mom can't possibly know whether you had symptoms as a child because "symptoms" are things you experience. "Signs" are things others observe.

Anyway, whether your mom thinks you had symptoms/signs isn't terribly relavent - it's whether the psychologist interviewing her thinks you had signs that are important.

I do know that in my case, my parents didn't think I had much in the way of repetitive behaviours as a child, but the psychologist actually told me that, although he had to dig for it, he thought he did find repetitive behaviours in what they described.

My mum says that I was a very sociable baby. As a toddler I loved joining in games and activities with other children. I even used to jump up and down with excitement whenever we had visitors round our house.

But I think some Aspie traits are just normal traits in typically developing toddlers, so a toddler on the milder end of the spectrum will just blend in and any awkwardness just gets recognised as "typical toddler traits". I mean I used to volunteer at a preschool with children aged 2-4, and most of them typically showed behaviours like repetitiveness, sensitivity to some loud noises, anxiety with unexpected situations, hand-flapping, meltdowns and some lack of eye contact when shy. Obviously not all children had all the traits, but the listed traits did commonly show up among the large group of children (we had about 20 children attend in the morning and 20 in the afternoon, plus new ones started so all in all there was around 50 children and I'm sure the vast majority of them weren't disguised Aspies). But if one or two were on the spectrum, it went unnoticed because of the similiarities with NT and Aspie babies and toddlers.
Obviously if a baby or toddler is more autistic then their traits will show up more.