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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Any experience with this diagnosis?

We brought DS to a psychologist, who at almost age 4, has about a 6 month speech delay. He is painfully shy, introverted, and prefers parallel play. He never showed signs of ASD (initiates play, though struggles in groups) but has always been quirky. He initiated and played with the two aides she had observing, though was easily distracted when she wanted to read, and then again sit to sing together. He focused mainly on playing with her collection of cars. He is in school where he follows directions and is cooperative, though doesn't love the noise and rowdiness of being in a class with 22 kids. Noting his anxious temperament, we brought him for an evaluation to see what we could do to help.

She recommended a social skills group, more speech therapy, and OT (thought his core looked week, and asked how he ran, which is a bit slow and awkward).[/quote]

My son has something similar- they keep changing the diagnosis- HFA and Pragmatic-Semantic disorder in previous incarnations of the DSM. He was in a social skills group in ES until they cancelled it.  He was in a weekly private social skills group from mid 4th grade to the beginning of 12th grade.  If I had known earlier he would have been in it earlier.  The more social encounters the better and they need to be supervised activities.   Scouts was great for our DC, he played in the orchestra, but band, chorus or theatre are also great activities.  We also belonged to a Congregation that practices and taught inclusion and radical hospitality. There are different congregations are inclusive and they run the gamut of faith- it if one does work- try a different one- same goes for the scout troop.  This really helped in HS when he was  in the youth group.  He also has some pragmatic-sematic issues that made English in HS difficult- especially fiction.  Summer camps were hard to find-until we found KidRealm in Arlington and he found he loved role playing games- he went to this camp until he was too old to attend.

He is now a sophomore in college (studying Computer Engineering) and has found his "tribe" with a club that plays a role playing game that is specific to that school (similar and not similar to dungeons and dragons).  He has found study groups and friends to hang with on the weekend.  It was a long slog from social pariah in early ES to where he is now and we have seen him mature slowly- he seems to be about 3 years behind his peers.  So, try not to compare your child to his peers, look at the progress your child has made over the past 6 months or year.[/quote]

Op here- thank you!  Do you mind telling me what your son was like through toddlerhood, preschool, etc.? What seemed to help the most?

DS has always been immature, and the psychologist was on the fence about whether or not he needed to see a developmental pediatrician. She said he had the "soft symptoms" of this...thrown off by the fact he makes jokes, tells me about his "friends," etc. She wanted to see more cooperative play at this age (he prefers solo to groups), more eagerness to join in (he hates birthday parties, crowds, etc.), and more dialogue with classmates (I think his speech delay is probably the biggest issue on the table).[/quote]

To be honest, it wasn't until 1st grade that I had any clue that there was an issue.  I think, for me, it was because he was in the range of my experience.  I grew up in a town that had more physicists per capita than any other place except Oakridge, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.  Then I went to college at a school where engineering dominated and most of my friends were engineers.  My father was a physicist and my DH is a physics/EE Engineer.  My whole life, I have been around people who would probably have been diagnosed similarly or on the mild end of the autism spectrum.  I also think, if we had lived in any of the above places, he would not have been as far off of the norm as he was in his Mclean elementary (which has lawyers like my hometown had physicists and professors from the various Boston schools).  Yes, I am stereotyping, but there is a reason for the stereotype- at least IME.  [/quote]

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