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[quote=Anonymous]I don't see how a FASD label helps kids.

As an adoptive parent, I think knowing that alcohol consumption during pregnancy puts the baby at risk for lots of different developmental outcomes, was helpful.

If I were a pregnant woman, I also think that knowledge would be helpful.

But as a special ed teacher, what I see is that people have much lower expectations for kids with the FASD label than they do for other kids with similar profiles.  And I think those expectations hurt kids.  So, once a kid is born, and placed if they need to be placed, I don't see how it is beneficial to kids to explore the possibility of an FASD diagnosis.   Most kids with FASD would also meet criteria for other conditions, and I think would be better served under those labels.

I will also say that I don't see how a kid with FASD can be confused with a kid with ASD.

In my experience, and all the reading I have done, if there's a symptom (besides things like facial differences) that is specific to FASD it's the difficulty connecting a behavior to its consequences, and learning from those consequences.  In my experience, many kids with ASD don't have that problem, in fact they sometimes have the opposite problem.  They do something, get reinforced naturally or intentionally and then "overlearn" that behavior and overapply it, or perseverate on it.

In contrast, I think the core symptom of autism is difficulty making sense of social behavior, something I have not seen to be a relative weakness for kids with FASD.  Of course, language delays and cognitive delays in FASD can cause some social difficulties, but social cognition isn't generally worse than other skills, whereas with ASD it's a marked weakness.

Now, are there other symptoms like language delay, and impulsivity that overlap?  Yes, but there is really a difference in those two diagnoses.

And before someone points it out, I will acknowledge that yes, someone can have the predisposition to develop autism and then get exposed to alcohol in utero and end up with both.  [/quote]

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