Symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Here is some background on my 7 year old son Mac and his eventual diagnosis with ASD.

Mac was a difficult baby to say the least.  Very colicky, we couldn't take him anywhere from the get-go.  If we tried to take him to a restaurant to eat, we would just have to take turns holding him and walking him around the place to keep him from crying.  And man could he cry.  Its hard to believe a creature that small can produce that many decibels.

At this point, no alarm bells were going off for us.  We just figured we had a "high-maintenance" kid.  Up until the age of about two years, he seemed to be developing normally.  He smiled, made eye-contact, and his language development was where it should have been.  His mom and I also didn't know any symptoms of autism or ASD other than what we had seen on television with the most severe cases - no language, no smiling, banging their head against the wall.

Soon after Mac turned two, we started noticing some unusual things.  He would make up words for certain objects and start calling them that.  It didn't matter how many times we gave him the correct word - he insisted on using his own.  Often times, too, when we would try to get him to answer a question, he would just repeat our question instead of answering it.  For example, "Mac, do you feel happy?"  Instead of saying "yes or no" he would respond "happy?" with our same intonation.  In ASD terms, this is known as echolalia.

We also noticed him memorizing lines from shows he watched and then using the phrases in place of actual speech.  For example, he took the line "do you know where the ball is?" from Dora the Explorer, and would use it to convey he had lost something (not a ball).  Again, in ASD terms, this is known as scripting.

Mac was also obsessed with light and fan switches.  His favorite thing to do was to turn lights on and off, on and off, on and off.  It seemed a little OCD, but, again, we figured he had just found something he was interested in, and that he would soon move on to something else.

Another symptom Mac had which we didn't recognize at the time was "hand-flapping."  Whenever Mac would get excited he would start flapping his hands like he was trying to take-off flying.  Again, we just chalked it up to being a quirky personality trait.

As Mac started getting closer to age 3, and his language skills started slipping, we began to get concerned.   Autism was still not even a dot on my radar at this point, be we decided he might need some language therapy to get him up to speed.  We talked with his pediatrician.  While she conceded he was a little behind for his age, she didn't feel overly concerned.  However, she referred us to a speech therapist, and this was where things fell into place.  During our first session with her, she never mentioned the word "autism", but she said she definitely felt like there was something more going on with Mac than just simple speech delay.  The alarm bells were finally ringing for his mom, but I was still in denial.  I had thought it was ridiculous that we were even bringing him to a speech therapist, but the idea that he was autistic was ludicrous to me.  All of the quirky things he did were just Mac being Mac.  But then we started looking into the symptoms of ASD, and all of Mac's strange behaviors started to make sense.  We eventually had him evaluated by ASD experts at UCLA medical center who confirmed what we feared.  We were crushed, and angry out ourselves for not having figured it out sooner, since early therapy and treatment is extremely crucial for children with ASD.