Autism – Benefits of Early Assessment and Intervention

Consulting a Specialist Speech and Language Therapist can help you in several ways: assessment, informal and formal observation, discussion and advice, onward referrals, direct intervention, parent coaching, educational support and much more, all geared towards supporting you the parents, and helping your child to flourish and thrive.

First up, we can help you with assessment and advice: with a wealth of expertise in observing childrens’ play and communication, as well as knowledge of the latest research we can see a child’s strengths and areas of struggle very quickly indeed.

Within a short space of time, we can identify the areas we need to focus on and start guiding you towards helping your child to connect, respond, react and feel better.

Early detection is key

If autism is detected in infancy, then therapy can take full advantage of the brain’s plasticity. It is hard to diagnose Autism before 18 months but there are early signs we know to look out for. Let’s have a brief look at the sorts of things we look at.

The earliest signs of Autism involve more of an absence of typical behaviours and not the presence of atypical ones.

• Often the earliest signs are that a baby is very quiet and undemanding. Some babies don’t respond to being cuddled or spoken to. Baby is being described as a ‘good baby, so quiet, no trouble at all’.
• Baby is very object focused: he/she may look for long periods of time at a red spot/twinkly item further away, at the corner of the room for example.
• Baby does not make eye contact: we can often see that a baby looks at your glasses for example instead of ‘connecting’ with your eyes.
• At around 4 months we should see a baby copying adults’ facial expressions and some body movements, gestures and then increasingly cooing sounds we make; babies who were later diagnosed with autism were not seen to be doing this.
• Baby does not respond with smiles by about 6 months.
• By about 9 months, baby does not share sounds in a back-and-forth fashion.
• By about 12 months baby does not respond/turn their heads when their name is called.
• By around 16 months we have no spoken words; perhaps we hear sounds that sound like ‘speech’ but we cannot make out what the sounds are.
• By about 24 months we see no meaningful two-word combinations that are self-generated by the toddler. We might see some copying of single words.

24 months plus:

• Our child is not interested in other children or people and seems unaware of others in the same room/play area.
• Our child prefers to play alone, and dislikes being touched, held or cuddled.
• He/she does not share an interest or draw attention to their own achievements e.g., ‘daddy look I got a dog’.
• We can see our child not being aware that others are talking to them.
• We see very little creative pretend play.
• In the nursery our child might be rough with other children, pushing, pinching or scratching, biting sometimes; or our child might simply not interact with others and be unable to sit in a circle when asked to.

What sort of speech and language difficulties might we see?

Our child might do any of the following:

• have no speech at all, but uses body movements to request things, takes adults by the hand
• repeat the same word or phrase over and over; sometimes straight away after we have said it or sometimes hours later
• repeat phrases and songs from adverts or videos, nursery rhymes or what dad says every day when he gets back from work etc.
• copy our way of intonation
• not understand questions – and respond by repeating the question just asked:
  • adult: Do you want apple? child: do you want apple?
• not understand directions or only high frequency directions in daily life
• avoid eye contact or sometimes ‘stares’
• lack of pointing or other gestures

Common behaviours:

• Hand flapping
• Rocking back-and-forth
• Finger flicking or wriggling/moving
• Lining up items/toys
• Wheel spinning, spinning around self
• Flicking lights on and off, or other switches
• Running back-and-forth in the room, needing to touch each wall/door
• Loud screaming when excited
• Bashing ears when frustrated or excited
• Atypical postures or walking, tip toeing, can be falling over easily, uncoordinated
• Can be hyper sensitive to noises, smells, textures, foods, clothing, hair cutting, washing etc.
• Being rigid and inflexible, needing to stick to routines, unable to transition into new environments
• Food sensitivity, food avoidance, food phobias

I mentioned this to be a ‘brief’ look at the areas and it is: each topic is looked at very deeply and each area is multi-facetted therefore a diagnosis is rarely arrived at very quickly. We want to make sure we have covered all aspects and have got to know your child very well before coming to conclusions.

Early detection is key, because we want to start helping your child to make progress as quickly as is possible. If you feel /know that your child is delayed in their speech and language development and you would like a professional opinion then please do contact me, I look forward to supporting you. It is important to know at this point, that if your child only has one or two of the above aspects it may mean that your child is simply delayed for reasons other than Autism and if that is the case, we will be able to help you iron out a few areas of need so that your child can go on thriving.

If you need help with your child, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.