Help me! New "mom" to autistic child

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Hello everyone. Im looking for all the help and info i can get. My husband and i just got joint custody of his 8 yr old daughter who he hadnt seen in months because his ex uses her children like a carnival ride and charges admission. Anyway, it was my first time meeting her but i've loved her before i met her. As a mom to an 8 yr old boy, the things hubby would say would strike me as odd for his daughters age at the time but i just said all kids are different not all are hyper like mine. Recently we learned that my step daughters home life is not good and we are filing full custody and im sure issues with our princess will arise when that happens. So once i met her i immediately knew she was autistic, in my own line of work i know the signs and such but i have limited knowledge on how to help her, the best questions to ask her pediatrician and what more we can do. She is in a special ed class in school but thats about as much as we know. Her mother has three other children who are autistic from what i've gathered but the mom herself doesnt seem to accept the challenges and work towards helping her children. Not to defend her but she has virtually no high school education even so she probably doesnt know what to do, she is fairly young with 7 kids. Anyway, our princess can recognize her name but cant spell it, does not know her abc's and if i had to put an age to her behavior and speech i would estimate at a 4 yr old. I am a researcher when it comes to things affecting my family so i am asking all of you to point me in a direction.

What types of things do i bring up to her doctor?
How can i help her conquer abc's
What can i do to provide her with the tools she needs in life?
How do i assist in helping her communicate? At her moms they physically fight over toys and here that is not acceptable
Anything else you can think of would be great!

what does that entail?

How severe is the case of the child?



I think, given this, that it would be a good idea to limit the time the child spends around the mum, if not completely cutting off contact.

Q; What types of things do i bring up to her doctor?
A; State what your background is (importantly, how you recognised the autism traits from your own line of work.), and what the kids background is.

Q;How can i help her conquer abc's
A; This completely depends on the severity of the case, if you provide me more infomation on this, I'd be able to help more.

that being said, the easiest way might be to find something the kid is interested in, such as a toy... etc. and associating that with letters/numbers.

Q;What can i do to provide her with the tools she needs in life?
A; at this stage, try to focus solely on teaching the kid important life lessons, like reading. it's very likely the kid needs this more then anything else if she is to succeed.

Q; How do i assist in helping her communicate? At her moms they physically fight over toys and here that is not acceptable.
A; by teaching her how to speak maybe? and try to get the message across that fighting over toys is not acceptable wherever she goes. naughty seat, etc.

and you might also want to watch her when she goes to a friends house, as she could start fighting over toys, thinking that it might be ok there, but not at your house.

Most of your questions are going to be tough to answer until you get to know her better and get her properly evaluated. You are going to need an idea of what her strengths are in addition to her weaknesses, to see what you can leverage to get her to improve.

I would first off try to get as much information from her current school placement about any testing that has already been done. How are her verbal receptive and expressive skills, does she use PECS, etc.

I hesitate to offer any more concrete assistance without further information because spectrum children are so different from one another. In addition it may be slow going at first and progress may even regress while the tumult of her family situation is being dealt with. She is going to have to adjust to your family.

Thank you all for your help. I know I am being rather vague, basically because I am just learning myself and my husband, well he has no idea - he was always that parent that says there isn't anything wrong. Ok well not wrong but different I tell him and its something we have a duty as parents to help her the best we can. The awakening was having our two 8 yr olds together and it was then that he finally discussed with me the things he noticed when he was around and the little clues his ex gave without realizing it. Its been a huge adjustment for him to accept but he has gotten there. My background is I am a behavioral therapist for traumatic brain injury patients. The type of patients that I deal with are far from young children and i dont want to do the wrong thing.

My husbands ex - 7 kids and 5 different fathers. Our princess is child number 4 and the 3 in front of her are at least 5 years older. All the younger ones have some form of Autism from what I can see. My husband wasn't as active in his daughters life because aside from child support, his ex would charge a fee to see his daughter. Naive to the system, he never knew what to really do but thats not an excuse. When she needed help with the kids, he would stay there and so on.....so he was around but not as consistently as he should be, but then again, neither is mom.

Her ABC skills. Well immediately i noticed that she can identify her name but can not spell it. Our princess loves to sing so while i was preparing dinner one night we sang the abc's - she can not get passed G. At which she gets very upset, almost like a tantrum if I try to give her the next letter.

My understanding of the situation is that when she is with her mom, she goes to school and home. Never are the kids outside, she doesn't know anything about playing outdoors. Never goes to friends houses etc. We did have her over at my nieces house where there is a 1 yr old - we struggled with her sharing and taking from the baby but there was no hitting. Hubby says at home though the kids will hit and slap, and break each others toys and that this is the daily norm. We have found out that cps has been involved in the home with her mom and neglect guilt was found a few times. That said, we have filed fully custody but you know thats a process and in the mean time we still have joint and want to do all that we can to help our girl and that entails educating myself and the husband but i have to feed him info in small bites.

One example of my behavioral concerns - the mom told us to buy diapers and make sure she wears them at night and at other times at home. We chose not to do this, but to see how it went initially. The first few days we had no problem. We did find that if we even mentioned the word bathroom, she went and used it. On the 4th day i saw a wet spot on my dining room chair and asked if she had an accident. She told me no, and indeed she didnt. What alarmed me was after that she told me "I don't pee my pants at daddy's, I only pee my pant's at mommy's" I asked her why, although I really didn't expect an answer. She typically does not answer questions with anything other than an "yeh" and I find giving her a choice of 2 works best. Anyway, to my surprise she told me that "mommy bathroom too dirty, daddy's not like that" I about stroked out right there! I didnt know what to say!! I told my husband later on in private and I was almost in tears. When it came time to bring her to her mothers she cried she wanted to stay with us. I know as i'm with her more, i'll pick up more, i'm just trying to get a heads up on the situation as to not do anything wrong, to also help my husband get the right answers and to give us techniques and ideas of really how to manage. We have been blessed that my son, who is also 8 but younger by a few months is as empathetic as he is and although hard on him initially because he was really the receiver of tantrums, has declared himself the "younger big brother" of course any ideas on how to include them both in things would be wonderful! so far coloring and teaching our princess how to jump in leaves has been what has worked so far.

i wanted to also mention her speech - from what I gather, at some point they may have thought she was hard of hearing as she wore hearing aides. Her speech does sound like someone who has hearing problems. She is a talker though, although its more like babbling. Very little is understandable and its nothing direct. An example, colors. When we are out driving she will go on and on about the colors.

OK, I am going to have to think about some of this. You don't want to push her too hard right now b/c she is dealing with a lot.

Colors might be a special interest. That could help you. I would get or make a really colorful, pretty alphabet wall hanging to put up somewhere in the house. If there really is not room and you think it is too overstimulating to put in her room, then get or make a colorful alphabet book. Another suggestion might be to go online find a free Pantone or rgb color guide (or heck even free paint samples at your local big box store) and teach her color names that start with different letters. (Most of the standard regular colors begin with g or less, aside from white but you could add colors like turquoise (and say turquoise begins with 'T." If it works you could make a book out of that for her. The general idea is if you can link the thing you want her to learn with something she already likes, you might improve your success and she may get less frustrated. Nothing is ever a guarantee, of course.

As far as as sharing goes, it will take her a bit to get trained out of what she is used to. I would try to encourage turn taking. (Use a timer, so she can see/hear when the turns change.) You will have to spend a lot of time supervising play to make sure she does not trash stuff, if that is what she is used to.

I will ponder. If I think of more I will post, but that is what immediately jumps out at me.

Fantstic idea about the alphabet and colors book! She loves pictures and has almost destroyed all my albulms because she is a bit rough but you just gave me a wonderful idea!! ! Thank you! Every little bit helps!! ! Now off to pick my brain on what to connect with each letter.

She might be hard of hearing, but there's another possibility. I have trouble with music - not because I am "tone deaf", but because I hear so many different things I could never figure out what part of the sound was the "note". The same note sounds different even made by two different guitars - forget about an organ, bagpipes, etc.

I am hyperlexic and figured out how to read mostly on my own - but if adults had tried to teach me, I suspect they might have confused me. I could have easily gotten hung up on different fonts (letterforms).

I am self-diagnosed (when I was growing up, no one guessed you could be hyperlexic and also autistic, and in my case, I was also a "genius" and legally blind, so those things kept anyone from looking too closely at me) and have had to figure a lot out on my own in the past few years. The most important thing I would tell you is this: the experts only see the outside. Most of them can't even guess what's going on here on the inside. You have to pay attention to her, and take her seriously, even when that seems absurd to you. That's the only way you can figure out where she's coming from, and work out a way to help her.

I'm not just saying this out of emotion. I have been injured (to the point I had blood pouring out of an ear for half an hour) by a doctor who assumed he knew more than I did and ignored what I told him. I've had many other, lesser experiences that didn't work out well for me because people took for granted that what I was saying was wrong. And once I figured out what I was dealing with, I've discovered, over and over, that conventional wisdom often did me much more harm than good. I can barely eat vegetables at all, because the whole issue of food was handled badly when I was young, and I learned to hate the tastes and textures. And so on...

I would say this: you need the help of a professional, probably several different ones. The problem is that it's possible she was being neglected in her other home, and it will be very difficult to figure out whether her symptoms are a result of that, or whether something like autism is going on - very likely both.

I'd ask for an assessment by a neuropsychologist or developmental pediatrician and a social worker as well. You need the insight of someone who isn't a member of your family at the moment to make sure this child is getting everything she needs the way she needs it, and her needs might well be different from many kids on the spectrum because of her home situation.