Early Signs

Post Reply New Topic

I was wondering what signs, if any, of AS/Autism some of you here exhibited as infants and young children. Were they obvious at the time or a big concern to your parents, or were they things that no one thought were a big deal at the time(but might seem obvious when looking back now)?

Talking to my parents, it doesn't seem like i had anything that would have really obviously pointed to it when i was really little.. Just minor things. They do say that i cried a lot as a baby, and that i didn't smile much or make much eye contact. I also hated having lotion and stuff rubbed on me. But i babbled, talked, walked, and everything on time. I did have a lot of imaginative play, but it was usually either by myself or involved me wanting to be in control and make the rules. Growing up I usually responded to my name and was pretty quiet and well-behaved, though.. Except for some tantrums(mom says that i used to hit my head on things or pull my hair during some tantrums). And my parents don't remember any kind of obvious stimming when i was young at all. I would point to things and stuff, but for awhile, apparently, when waving hello or goodbye to someone i would wave toward myself instead of away from myself at the other person(i don't know if that means anything or not, but it is funny). lol. Apparently i didn't have any problems sharing and letting other kids use my toys usually, but one time when i was at a doctor's office, apparently, another kid reached for a toy that i was playing with and i hissed(yes, hissed. like a cat or snake) at him. They say i didn't mind cuddling and stuff, which is funny because i HATE being touched or hugged nowadays. In pre-school and elementary school it was pretty apparent that i wasn't good at social situations, still didn't smile a lot, and i was often quiet and just chose not to talk to some people. I also got obsessed with certain tv shows and movies that i would watch over and over. And i also had a time where i was obsessed with washing my hands, and for awhile i was extremely bothered by certain types of clothes that i found uncomfortable. But i learned to ride a bike, was like a monkey on playground equipment, and all that kind of normal stuff. I generally followed rules very well and wasn't disruptive in class. So there were little things, but nothing that seems like your typical "autism red flags." No rocking, flapping, lining up toys, or motor abnormalities that they can recall.

I think the biggest thing is that I would flip out every now and then, especially in school. I can remember doing it in grade school but I'm trying to remember if I ever went nuts in preschool. But little kids have fits kind of often so maybe I wouldn't have been the only one in my class to do it, so that could be why I don't remember. My mom said I started getting weird at like 2. Like, being difficult, and deviating from what her parenting books were saying.
I think I lined stuff up, but no rocking or flapping. And I learned most things at the normal time.

I think it can be different for different people. My mother said my sister screamed from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day and she is NT. I, on the other hand, was a distant baby who only cried when I was hungry or wet. I would not protest when my sister stole my bottle. I guess it depends for an Aspie on the degree of sensory sensitivity.

I was sick a lot as a child. My parents were charmed by early indications of high intelligence, and overlooked entirely any indications of abnormalities in socialisation. Of course, this was lower class England in the 1950s

My early signs that might've hinted at AS were interpreted by my parents as signs of high intelligence. I had obsessions with counting, calculus, etc. at a very early age (was doing square calculation at age 6, for example). Other things I don't know. I was late to reach some motor milestones (eg. rolling over, sitting), but this may also be due to my prematurity and brain bleed with hydrocephalus...but then again no-one can be sure whether this also agravated my AS. I was by the way very quick to learn to speak, cause I could talk in short sentences by age 1.

I have videos of myself from when I was 1-4 years old and my mum and I can now look back and see that it was obvious that I was different. My mum thought nothing of my oddities when I was that age, only that it was a 'phase'.

I used to do this thing where I would flip my hands infront of my eyes over and over again, this is on a lot of the videos. I also didn't respond to my name very often. My mum would stand there with the video camera calling my name and I would completely ignore her because I was so focused on looking at something. In one of the videos I was running around and around the fridge making a weird humming sound. My mum said to the camera..."This is her little running game" (because she was going to be sending the video to my grandma). There is a video of me on Christmas day, I was 3 at the time. My dad got me a toy that made several different animal noises and I sat in one place for about 20 minutes pressing the button that made the rooster noise, ignoring everything else.
There were also a few things that my mum told me that weren't on the videos. I never crawled, it's not that I didn't have the ability but that I never even attempted to. One day I just got up and walked and before that I slid around on my bum, however that's not very uncommon.
Apparently at kindergarten I refused to play with the other children. I was 4 at the time and my mum said that I would mostly just sit and look at books, although I'm not sure if I was actually reading them or not. My mum said that she once had a meeting with the teacher about a 'social intervention'. I remember my mum and teacher trying to get me to play with kids one day and I did my best to refuse.
I also had a strange phobia - patterns. I wouldn't sit on any patterned furniture or walk across patterned mats. If I had to I would gag and sometimes even vomit. This was from the age of 4-7 (or maybe 8, I can't really remember).

That's all I can think of that might be connected to my AS.

My mum did this to me and I was born in 1991!
In the videos she took of me, she ignored that fact that I was odd and paraded that fact that I could name every single plant in her garden by it's scientific name at the age of 3. Strangely enough, I now don't know any of their names.
When I first started school my reading ability tested at 3 and 1/2 years above age level and my mother became hyperfocused on my homework, practically demanding that I get everything right and ignoring the fact that I was bullied and socially isolated from other kids. This happened right up until the age of 11, when I started middle school.

We all know the LFA/HFA signs, they're easy to spot.

Now AS, this can be harder, especially as the child with AS tends to interact well with their family, just no one outside of such (preschool is when it's evident as interaction with peers and different adults is required).

I'd say that the child with AS will focus on detail in what they do, like staring at a spider in a spider's web for an inordinate amount of time (transpose this over everything); they'll have an interest that they readily consume facts and details about, and they may be able to recite it all perfectly (little professor); they'll probably seem to ignore people outside of the family, like they appear deaf, and they'll either play by themselves when preschool comes around or play inappropriately with their peers (like showing aggression).

O, and to answer your question, yeah, it was easy to spot, but it was only a concern to my mother in some situations when I threw the "Hulk Smash" tantrums. She thought how I lined my toys up on my bed in order of size as a sign of intelligence, for example.

My signs were so easy to spot by the age of three but I had been in daycare and nursery schools most of my life, so, I was always having to interact with kids and others not in my family. Maybe one way to do some early screening is to send your child to a daycare or "mothers day out" program and see what they say? This is one way to find out how your child interacts with other kids before they get to kindergarten or pre school.

I would vomit whenever my parents tried to give me solid food as a baby, and I took a lot more things literally. I also barely understood things around me and was slow walking around towns and cities because I had to process everything around me.

I had red flags, but people weren't really concerned about that some 20 years ago as long as intelligence and language seemed normal.

From this list (just googled and found here) I had all the bold ones.

■ not play “pretend” games (pretend to “feed” a doll)
■ not point at objects to show interest (point at an airplane flying over)
■ not look at objects when another person points at them
■ have trouble relating to others or not have an interest in other people at all
■ avoid eye contact and want to be alone
■ have trouble understanding other people’s feelings or talking about their own feelings
■ prefer not to be held or cuddled or might cuddle only when they want to
■ appear to be unaware when other people talk to them but respond to other sounds
■ be very interested in people, but not know how to talk, play, or relate to them
■ repeat or echo words or phrases said to them, or repeat words or phrases in place of normal language (echolalia)
■ have trouble expressing their needs using typical words or motions
■ repeat actions over and over again
■ have trouble adapting when a routine changes
■ have unusual reactions to the way things smell, taste, look, feel, or sound
■ lose skills they once had (for instance, stop saying words they were using)

I used to talk and talk and talk endlessly about things that interested me. I still really enjoy the chance to do that, but I realize I can't do it all the time. I also was way more sensitive to temperature than I am now. I couldn't get into a hot tub without feeling like I was being burned. I also had the hyperfocus I still have. I would read a book in class and not notice that my teacher was standing above me just waiting for me to stop spacing out (still cracks me up, it amused us both a lot). The thing that's funniest to me is I used to count on my fingers in my sleep. It's hilarious to me because my parents would notice and then jokingly say they had a little Rain Man.

I was a "strange" kid according to my parents. They didn't know what I had, and I was mostly blamed for the autistic traits. As if a baby has any self-determination and could choose to be normal! I did the airplane thing, made up my own words, spent a lot of time looking at books, and singing/humming when I was a little older.

I showed a lot of symptoms when I was really young. The most obvious symptom was the special interests. I had clear-cut special interests by 18 months. My sensory issues were also very bad. I was the typical Aspie child who could not stand the feeling of clothes and who needed the tags cut out of their shirts. Other symptoms were hyperlexia, fantastic memory, and toe-walking. My mother was always really impressed and proud of my memory, and she liked me to recite songs and the alphabet and such on home movies. So, like most Aspies, lots of Aspie symptoms were thought to just be giftedness. My need for routine/hatred of change really didn't stick out as an AS sign when I was young. It was known that I liked sameness, but there wasn't a lot of change in my life when I was very young, so I didn't exhibit this much. I also had a lot of anxiety, but this was more OCD than AS. There were other signs of AS, but these were the most overt.
-OddDuckNash99-

Nothing really in the early years. When I got a little bit older, it was obvious that I preferred to spend time with myself over playing with other kids. My play was nothing like my brother's. He enjoyed Adventure People, whereas I enjoyed singing into a tape recorder and picking out melodies on my toy organ.

I was also apparently a rather clumsy kid. I tripped over everything and was awful at team sports. My mother rationalized this later by realizing that my problem was related to the fact that I needed glasses. While I think there is some truth to that, it doesn't explain everything. For instance, she seemed to believe that my relatively late acquisition of glasses gave me motor skill trouble. The idea that I was simply naturally clumsy (due to something like hypotonia) never came up.

The two biggest things that stand out from my early years were
1. I stopped talking for a while after I started (apparently my mother also did this).
2. In preschool and for my first few years of primary school, I had no interest whatsoever in playing with the other children, and no idea that I was "meant" to play with them. I could see that they wanted to play with each other, but the way I saw it was that they were the type of children who liked playing with each other, and I was the type of child who liked being alone and reading books, and that there was nothing wrong with this.