School District Eval. was Today

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The evaluation went well, and they told me just what I expected - he's smart as a whip and his mind is turning a million miles an hour. We won't know official scores for a while yet but they said he is above average pretty much across the board. They want to watch him at school (he is in preschool) to see how he is with his peers, which is where I find the issue to be. They will wait a couple weeks since the school year just started and he tends to have a "honeymoon phase" with anything new. The school is very structured which works well for him, so I don't see him having issues with actually doing the work anytime soon. It's only three hours, twice a week. He can hold it in for that long...when he leaves school though, he is a terror the rest of the day for me. I shudder to consider how he will be in 8 hour school days eventually...

They will be sending me the names of some child psychologists and what not here in town that they know have experience with AS/ASD, so I will be pursuing that soon. Any suggestions of questions to ask and who to look for? I am afraid to end up with someone who will assume that since he is okay in one situation, or since he is smart, that he automatically doesn't have any other issues. I am also hoping to find someone who deals with gifted children and the particular issues that can come along with that...so how do I find all that out? I have not had great experiences with pre-screening doctors for other things...it seems that office staff doesn't know the answers and the doctors never want to be on the phone. We may be paying out of pocket and I can't afford to see 5 wrong doctors before finding one who will listen to us.

When you call each psychologist, ask if they are certified to perform the ADOS (autism diagnostic observation schedule). If not, ask if they know anyone who is. You might look for a "developmental psychologist", a "developmental pediatrician", or a "developmental neurologist". Ours was at a "Developmental Evaluation Clinic" at the local Children's hospital. You can also call local ABA providers and ask where to go for diagnosis.

The other good option is to find a group that does a multidisciplinary evaluation that includes an OT, a speech therapist, and a psychologist. Always ask if they have experience diagnosing mild autism and/or Aspergers in verbal preschoolers.

We were very fortunate to fine a great practice here with at least two ASD savvy psychologists. If you have a local CARD (Center for Autism and Related Disabilities) office, you can check with them for recommendations - they would be affiliated with a local university. It absolutely makes a huge difference in accurately DXing these high functioning kids and it is vitally important to have that information now.

With our doctors, I knew I had found the right one within a few minutes of talking to Dr. K. on the phone. It was a 100 degree shift from what we had experienced with several other "professionals". Because of some very challenging behaviors we sought counseling services and were met with a huge degree of understanding, flexibility and compassion, all within the context and perspective of helping someone on the spectrum, not changing them or expecting them to be more typical. Our previous experience with a counselor was met with, "You are his mother - you tell him what to do and MAKE HIM DO IT!" when he was trying to control every aspect of his and our lives, because of his anxiety. We had the comments (mostly by school personnel) that, "He's smart enough, he should be able to figure this out" which never does anyone any good. :/

I'll second the recommendation for the ADOS. We had ours performed at a local university as part of an autism family genetics study. It's not a parent or teacher rated assessment - it's administered and scored by a trained clinician, so there is much less subjectivity. They're looking for certain language/social interaction patterns (or lack of them) while they interact with the child. Our older guy was actually an on-stage test subject for our local CARD ADOS training. Interesting to watch!

Thank you so much for both of your replies! It is so helpful to have advice from parents vs just random googling. This gives me a good place to start.