about my daughter...

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My daughter is 4 1/2 years old.
She is a very good little girl.
I never had any trouble with her.
she was an easy baby. never cried (expect when hearing noise she didnt like... and when she was hungry) she used to stay all day on the floor since she was born.
I was leaving her on her play mat for HOURS. And never hear a thing from her.
When i wanted her to be in bed, i would just put her in it. and.. well that s it. a kiss. and good night.
Sometimes she wasnt sleeping, she was jsut happy in her bed.

she gets very stressed when we are in a new environment. She doesnt like when people are talking to loudly around her (we were on a queue to go to an exhibition. and we had to wait for half an hour. There were loads of school group. She starts to say "shut up" "stop making so much noise" and she sat down on the floor, fingers in her ears....
She cries when there is too many children running around. It takes time for her to get used to it.
Her speech is not really good. I understand her, but others dont always... she understand 3 languages, so maybe it is the reason she doesnt speak well (But then again, i see 2 years old children with 2 or 3 languages, speaking better than her))

she is starting to play with other, but sometimes i feel she is a little bit out of the game. Sometimes they will talk about something, and she will say something differently...

She is taking some swimming lesson once a week. She loves it a lot. I am watching her, we can see she is very ahppy in the water. But, i feel she doesnt understand everything the teacher is asking them to do. She will do her own thing, she will try to make laugh other, or show off what she can do (she loves being under water) Yesterday was her lesson, and they were suppose to float on their back, but she was doing something completly different. all the children were doing what the teacher was asking them...

She has problem with bladder control. She is having a lot of accident during the day. (her knickers are wet, so she has to change many times. . she doesnt realise that she is doing it.
She was "dry" at night, for a bit less than a year, and then since last year she is back in nappies because i hated changing sheets twice a day.

do you think she could have As or something else? I am so confused, i dont know what to do.

Hello!

A lot of that sounds like my son, who is now 9 years old, who didn't stop using nappies in the daytime until age 5, or in the night till age 6, but since then manages going to the toilet fine.

He too has seemed "out of phase" ( in exactly the way you say, as if what the teacher was saying was simply not being processed, or was irrelevant ), in the out-of-school classes he has attended, especially a music class. The noise was too much for him. But he is happy doing karate in a peaceful environment, a small group with a very grounded/calming teacher.

He too is bilingual; I am english but live in France with his french father. And he was virtually unintelligible until nearly 6 years old, and even now his french is still slower and clumsier/not idiomatic. He too will come out with odd phrases, repetitions of things.

He has difficulty joining in with a group of children though he loves to, for a while, with hide and seek and other non-verbal/spatial games, etc. But he can happily play for hours with one child at a time if that child is on the same wavelength.

And he is interested in lots of things, loves computer games, ( including chess, and draughts, aswell as puzzles, strategy and "war" games) , reading ( which he only started doing aged 7 and a half, but now does at incredible speed, reading Narnia, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Philip K Dick, etc ), and can write perfectly well, if somewhat slowly.

He home-unschools, which means that he can learn/DO whatever he wants most of the time, apart from an hour a day of "school" exercises so that he can pass the tests each year, and also that he is not exposed to lots of noise or crowds as he would be at school, which he tried but did not like.

He has never been diagnosed, but I think, based on what I have read here and elsewhere, that he is on the spectrum, some sort of so called Pervasive Development "Disorder", probably Aspie like me, but he is a happy child on the whole, sensitive, with strong emotions, enthusiasms, and likes and dislikes.

And he is getting the hang of things, slowly, and definitely later than is considered "normal", but having seen the progress he has made in so many areas over the last couple of years I am not as worried as I was at exactly the stage you describe, when he was five, or six, when he seemed so desperately behind on everything..

He is coeliac, intolerant of gluten. I just mention that because you said on the gluten-free diet thread that your daughter is allergic to nuts, and asthmatic.

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Last edited by ouinon on 09 Sep 2008, 7:22 am, edited 3 times in total.

i decided to home educating my children, for 100s of reasons. I was bullied badly in school and didnt want my children to suffer from that.

Last year, my daughter went to a playscheme. I worked there a little, but with the teenagers (i was doing jewelley workshop, my obsession at that time) and i popped over to see my daughter in the younger area (she was the youngest one because the age was 5+ and she was 3 1/2) the children were laughing at her, she had a buggy and some 7 years old boy stole it, and gave her a piece of plastic saying, "here is your baby" and she starts to cry saying "no that is not a baby" and i made me cry seeing that. I talked to the person in charge asking her "why you are not saying anything?" she was laughing, because she found it really funny, and said "well she will be stronger later in her laugh".
I am very weak BECAUSE i was bullied.
So i took her out of the playscheme, and never came back.
At the same playscheme, they had to sing a song, and for that day, i gave her a new lunch box.
She didnt put it down at all, so when they were on the stage (my daughter looking around, not understanding where she was suppose to go, and what she was suppose to do) she was holding her lunch box, and screamed blue murder when somebody told her to put it on the floor...

I am "following" a little bit the french curricullum (as i live in the uk.. )
So i know her level in comparaison. She doesnt like any work which involve writing, though she is starting to write letters to her friends (it is so funny to look at, because she is pretending to write on lines, so seriously). but other than that, she is quite good. She is unschooled too, so she does whaterver she wants whenever she wants (well not bed time, dinner etc.. only for learning). I have folders from which she can pick up anything she wants to do.
She is quite clever (well of course! no parents will say "my child is stupid"). She suprises me many times with what she learned on her own.

I feel like sometimes she is a teenager! when she is not happy, she will get up, walk out the room and slam the door. (very funny).
she has asthma, allergies to nuts and eggs (and humidity, damps, cockcroaches, flower, trees, housedusmites)


I went to see a doctor last week about the toilet problem, he asked me about any big change in her life. What she was playing with, if she was in a bedroom alone.
we send some urine sample, i am waiting for the results next week.
I asked if she could be on the spectrum and he just laughed and say something like "oh no!, she is normal"... Grrr...

My son doesn't either. He has said that holding the pencil hurts/makes his hand ache, although he will happily draw detailed complex diagrams/pictures/"maps" for hours ! ! . It's the "writing" that seems to be the problem; I don't know why.

He will not write joined up/form his letters so that they will join, as french schools, including the correspondence course we followed until last year, ( in very reduced doses! ) teach it, because he doesn't think they look like the real letters anymore. He writes his letters like in print/text, because that is what the "writing" ( that he tends to read) looks like!


Ditto. I think in some ways he is already experiencing the independence of mind of someone older, but this is difficult to "live"/handle when in so many other ways he is still so dependent.


I did worry, for a long time, and then I just decided that he would learn when he was ready, when he understood the logic of toilets as opposed to nappies, and he did; from one day to the next he was "dry" in the day, and a year later, on his sixth birthday, he said, now I can manage without nappies at night too. He felt confident that he could, and also disliked feeling hot in summer temperatures here at night!

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thank you (once again, you are very helpful!! !)
(i love the joined writing, but maybe because i was brought up in france, i cannot write in "print", so i have trouble to fill out form in the uk! lol)
a friend of mine bought an old type machine for her son who is aspie too. And he enjoyed writing then.

You are right, about the toilet problem i will wait until she feels she can managed without nappies at night

Would you consider having your son diagnosed?

So far I haven't seen any reason to do so.

If he went to school it might already have been essential in order to support/justify requests for special services/treatment, but with homeschooling he gets his special services/treatment automatically, when I am not sinking into conditioned attitudes about what a child should do and be anyway ( and that does happen, and is not pleasant, but usually I end up listening to him and hearing what he needs) !

I can imagine that he may want to go to school when he is a bit older, and perhaps at that point a diagnosis might be useful.

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the lack of bladder control apart from being observed in a young child is not uncommon for AS even adult AS and is related to hypotonia, - weak ligaments.
the ligaments that control the bladders sphincter(s) tire and get weak very easily so AS children need to "go" even thou their volume of urine wouldnt cause too much pressure on the pressure sensitive trnsitional epithelium of the bladder.
AS people will oftne dislocate knees and joints with minor knocks.

sounds like it could be AS. i'd get her evaluated

how can i do that? my Gp doesnt want to listen, he doesnt believe it is that..

Is it possible to get her to another dr? She needs one that will be willing to refer her to a professional that can assess her.

I will try to talk again to this doctor next week.

lay down the law for your doctor
what you describe does sound like it could be aspie related.
if he bulks, change doctors.
vote with your feed.

early intervention helps.

Your daughter sounds very much like mine, sitting surrounded by her toys as a toddler. getting stressed in queues and startled by loud noises. Mine has bowel problems too, she's tenyears old now, I have just had her diagnosed, but by a round about route!
I thought I must have been doing something wrong in the way I was bringing her up, eventually I went to the school nurse to ask for parenting advice and got an immediate "initial" diagnosis - obviosly the nurse had to refer us to a consultant whom confirmed it.
I had been to the doctor on a number of occassions and been told "she'll grow out of it" "it's perfectly normal"!
Prehaps you could contact your health visitor if you have one? They often have more experience with children and can see the differences more easily, also AS has some different symptons and signs in girls!

Thank you!! !

I've got a health visitor, but the first time we met, it wasn t a good experience.
i told her that my daughter is not going to go to school. She didn t like it, and said that she needs to meet other people, i answered that she does, (we go to home educator group every week for exemple).
The HS had some books to give to my daughter and she told her "come and talk to me and i will give you some books"
My little girl didnt want to go near her. then the HS looked at me and said "you see, she is very shy, it is not go, you have to send her to school"...

But anyway, i will call her, maybe i could talk to a colleague...

Hmmm, been there too! Becky does do eye contact if she feels "threatened" so to speak, if the Health visitorwas like that! ring the main medical practice in your area and ask to have a visit from another one.
I had to do this with my son (think he's NT) - another sorry completely but basically told me because I was divorced - her first question on meeting me, my son was overweight and ate too much junk food, - i very nearly threw her out of the house!

OOps!
that was supposed to read Becky does NOT do eye contact!

LOL
but seriously you can ask to see another Health Visitor - we can not be expected to get on with everyone we meet.

A dx will help you cope with the challenges and re-inforce your self-esteem when things get tough - that you are a good parent and you are NOT doing it wrong - it has certainly given me a different perspective and made general life easier because I am not so worried about her "unusal and uniquebehaviour"
Good Luck
Sue