Can any parents describe how their AS 3-4 year old was like?

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Mine has autism, not Asperger's. My son is virtually nonverbal and has no interests other than watching telebubbies and playing on the computer or watching the 20th century fox theme on You-Tube over and over again. I am very depressed and fear he will not have a good life, especially because we have no family and not a lot of money to provide for him after we die and my husband is 60.

I would love to hear from a parent whose child was a really late talker.

I've lost all hope.

first let me tell you that son wasn't dxed until he was 13.....looking back on how he was when he was little- he had a lot of difficulty getting along with the other kids at preschool. so much so that i had to make a behavior plan for him ( guess it's lucky i read an article about them in a parents mag)....his sense of direction was a bit off. i remember talking to him about the direction we were walking to go home from the library( ie; we take a left at the 3rd street). he responded that he didn't understand that, but that he had counted how many houses were between our house and the library- the library is 1.5 miles away .....we also used to sing on the way to the library. our favorite song was "down by the bay"- it's a rhyming song. we was quite proficient at finding words that rhymed. even took great pleasure in trying to find animals that i couldn't rhyme.( what rhymes with pelican?)..........finally, i remember asking him why he was upset over something. he replied that he wasn't upset. i replied that the expression on his face was an angry one. he was stunned. i had to take him in the bathroom & in front of the mirror work on facial expressions with him.....

I don't believe my son could have been diagnosed at 3.3. While he was different from other kids, it wasn't that far off. He certainly had more difficulty with transitions than average, and we had a system worked out for that. He also had more social issues than average, but nothing startling. My son loves people and social contact, but he is very aggressive and one-sided about it. Adults found it adorable at age 3, but other 3 year olds did not. He was already sleeping far less than average, as well, and a greater need to touch and move than average. He was very curious. VERY. And still is.

While it's easy to use hindsight and notice early warning signs, there really wasn't a sense that something was "off" until age 4, and at that time we thought it was the situation (preschool) more than the child. The real clues came when my son started K, and the disconnect between intelligence/perceived ability and ability to perform at school became obvious. I suddenly realized his writing development had been frozen for almost 2 years. Things like that.

I don't think diagnosis is important until there is something to be acheived from it, like services. And kids truly all develop differently, and should be allowed to do so, and to be who they are. We went into the process of getting an answer because that disconnect I was referring to above was really frustrating our child, and he was starting to withdraw and refuse to do things as a result. It was getting in the way of him succeeding as himself in life.

How old is your child? I've known many kids over my life who didn't talk until 4. In the days before Autism became well known, those kids were just quirky brilliant kids. Total silence and then full, perfect sentences. A neighbor boy was like that when I was growing up, and my friend's son (now a teen) had the same pattern. Both probably are on the spectrum, but neither was ever diagnosed. A child had to be really extreme in those days, as in not interacting with anything at all, or showing any signs of intelligence. The neighbor child? Millionaire silicon valley tycoon.

It sounds like your son interacts with media, and is showing signs of intelligent inner life. That is EVERYTHING. Don't lose hope.