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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My 3rd child is verbal, but she would literally shut down any time a stranger (adult or peer) approached her or tried to interact with her. I kept thinking she was just painfully shy until I realized she never warmed up to most people, period. There were other things that led to her diagnosis: Fleeting eye contact, lack of pretend play, imaginative play,[b] repetitive speech, repetitive play, restricted interests, rigidity[/b]. She's not my first to be diagnosed with autism, so around 26 months I realized that she too was on the spectrum. I would definitely get an evaluation done. It could well be just speech delays, but if you find a lot of behaviors that differ from the norm and it is pervasive, he might be on the spectrum. It's not unusual for a non-verbal child to be shy, as the child lacks the ability to interact, so either way I would have him checked out. [/quote]

Would you mind giving specific examples of some of this?[/quote]

Sure: She would say the same phrase (usually scripted from her favorite TV show) over and over... whether I acknowledged it or not. Such as: "Look, it's a butterfly" (not pointing or even looking in my direction) or single words when she would see something... Those phrases always had the exact same intonation each time, even when I encouraged her to say them differently or with a different tone. Her intonation is flatter than it should be and it is often off and not appropriate. She echoes all the time. Never says yes. As far as play goes, she would always do the exact same thing with toys and they were not functional, such as open and close the doors on her little kitchen, even when I stepped in trying to engage in pretend play. She would bang items rather than stacking them (she's doing that now with the help of ABA), she would drop items (such as her favorite TV show characters) in a bucket, pour them out, put them back in in the exact same way over and over.

Her play is slowly evolving, but she has no interest in pretending something is a phone, or pretending there is lotion in a bottle. Will not imitate affectionate play with dolls or other things, does not pretend to cook or clean. She pretended to feed us for a little bit, but it was the same item (cookie or pizza) and she wanted us to make the same sound over and over... for weeks, even when I tried to steer toward engaging her in more back and forth.

She is not interested in books, and the very few she lets me read are the same ones and I have to read them in the same way each time.

She is on a bedtime routine (mainly because she has 2 older siblings with autism), and she is very rigid, if I leave out the smallest part, she becomes upset. She will say the exact same thing at the same time each night. It's like clockwork. She does not like changes to that routine at all, same goes for other things. She's not as rigid as my first, but that's because she's the 3rd child. So if we normally do dinner, bath, milk, book, bed, I cannot change any of that or she may not sleep for several more hours. [/quote]

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