Symptoms of autism appearing at age 4 or later

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But my school FORCED my parents to go along with all the appointments and assessments. Yes they wanted me to get as much support as possible but also I think they were afraid that if they denied a diagnosis they might have been classes as bad parents or something.

it was an odd case for me from age 1 i never cried or had any meltdowns or tantrums I was completely mute and rather content
the only time I cried was when I hurt myself but that was it
I got diagnosed with autism at 3
and I didnt speak until I was 8

strangely I was fully potty trained by age 2 cos I hated soiled nappies but god knows how I managed to be able to use toilets without being able to express when I needed to go

Same time but different country and different people.

In early 1990s Poland was quite a mess, very poor, experiencing radical changes. I remember a girl in my first grade who was in her first grade for the third time before she was moved to "special school". She sometimes asked me if I had a spare sandwitch, which for a picky eater like me was quite a good arrangement. I remember a boy who was never really washed, when the school nurse recommended everyone to use lice medicine, she handed a bottle to him. I remember a girl from my class who smoked as 7yo.
And all the above was mixed with professors' children, nouveaux riches and all kinds of in-between, "regular" people.

I guess in such a crowd, a melancholic child who frequently hysterically cried "for no reason" and made unexpected social gaffes every now and then, was much more likely to be overlooked.

But so many Aspies here in England and the US seem to get diagnosed in adulthood - again I'm talking about those that grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. If they have a disorder, how did it get so overlooked through childhood, teenhood and the remaining adulthood before they got diagnosed? My brother got diagnosed with Asperger's at age 30. Nobody suspected any AS with him, even though he went to the same schools as me and grew up in the same household as a sister on the spectrum (me) and the A-word being thrown around a lot. Is it because he was well-behaved while I was a little hellion? Believe me, I was the devil to bring up. No wonder my poor mum is suffering from ill health now.

Very likely.

So if I hadn't been a little hellion then I would probably still be undiagnosed today? I have level 1 AS but I also have ADHD, but I didn't get a diagnosis of ADHD until I was older.

Maybe.
I got diagnosedd because of mental health problems I developed living with an unrecognized codition. And I barely escaped complete misdiagnosis.
If you weren't a little hellion, you would likely not have been diagnosed at 8. But nothing we know about 12, 16 or 24.

Absolutely. We also have the same audio sensitivities, smell sensitivities, and aversion to touch.

I think it the case that the knowledge about our profiles was not out there. Only the obvious parts of the spectrum were in the reference books at the start of the 1990s; Asperger Syndrome did not make the DSM until 1994, and it would take a while for the information to be picked up by the professionals and probably even longer for people who might spot signs the earliest, such as parents, teachers, nursery staff.

We showed the signs back then just as we do now, but they were either missed, put down to laziness, naughtiness, shyness, or something we would grow out of in our own time. I recall being taken for an assessment of some sorts when I was aged six or so, having had a very difficult time in nursery even at one day a week, and had many rocky periods in the first year of primary school. But the name which can draw the symptoms together into a diagnosis was not there in 1969. There was nothing particularly conclusive as far as I am aware from that one visit to the professional. Autism ? No way. I had language, lots of it. i hoovered up information. I was not disruptive,( but the social side and the unspoken side was something I did not seem to get). At that point, Autism meant Non Verbal, high chance of an intellectual disability as well, Very aloof, unsocial, all the aspects which would be at a severity level of 2 or 3 in today's reference books, meaning that a profile which would be a severity one had no name and was not believed to exist.

Being good at the academic subjects for the most part, being generally well behaved, following the rules at school (which all seemed very sensible rules to me) meant I kept out of trouble; the worst I had was over poor handwriting, or if I seemed to every fall short of the potential parents and teachers could see. It was still just about the era where one could find long term employment in specialist technical fields with some organisattions which had a paternalistic ethos, and this was the path I took, meaning that the amount of masking I had to do was small, I was in the company of others in my part of the spectrum but like me unaware of it.

I'm talking about those of us born between late 80s onwards, not prior.