sharing our autism diagnosis story

Sharing our journey of how we discovered our son has autism. Discussing some of the red flags often missed in detecting autism. Sharing my raw, emotional reaction. *Sorry about the video being cut short. For more info on our son’s progress and the early intervention we used, check out my blog post: http://shershares.com/2019/09/19/reco...#autism#autismdiagnosis#asd#autismredflags#autismsymptoms#autismtreatment#autismrecovery#autismintervention#specialneeds#specialneedsparenting#autismmom#autismblog#specialneedsblog

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Unknown Speaker 0:00

Hey, everyone, welcome to my little channel here, I am going to be sharing with you our autism diagnosis story today. And if you're not familiar with me, I'm share. And I have a blog called share shares blog. And you can find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. So I'll try to link all of those up for you. But anyway, it seems like everybody was interested when I did a poll across my social media to hear about our autism journey the most.

Unknown Speaker 0:29

So

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I'm gonna be sharing that story with you. And I'm going to try to stay on track because there's so many things I could say. newborn stages, for me, we're always chaotic and crazy. And it's why my kids are five years apart, because I just oh, that baby stage was rough.

Unknown Speaker 0:50

So

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I don't think I really ever knew anything was different. With our son, I just knew he was, it was kind of difficult, because he never slept. He worked every hour for like two years straight. So I was sleep deprived, emotional a basket case. I won't say that he had classic symptoms of autism. Because, you know, he'd give eye contact, he was very social, he wanted to talk and COO at everybody. However, he did have certain personality traits, that were all too indicative of autism, but I don't think I knew they were autism at the time. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about this. Because this is a personal pet peeve of mine, when it comes to autism research and awareness, and spreading the info on symptoms of autism for people to look for so that parents will know early on, we didn't know.

Unknown Speaker 1:58

Y'all, if I had a quarter, for every time someone told me that, quote, if you've met one child with autism, you've met one child with autism, y'all I would be rich. I heard it over and over again, when we first started hearing, our son might have autism drove me nuts, I didn't want to hear it. It was like stop quoting these cliche things. But it is so true. Okay. The autism such a spectrum, every child is different, and every case is different. And there are symptoms that you have in common. A lot of times, you know, there's, there's enough symptoms you'll see. But there's so many different types of symptoms that a child could have, and nobody has the same exact set of them. So it's important to be familiar with all of the symptoms. And just because your child does not look like Rain Man, and act like Rain Man, does not mean they're not on the spectrum. And what happened with us was we first, you know, when we started hearing it, and people started putting that little bug in our ear, we started going out on all the websites and looking at like, Okay, what are the symptoms? Does our child have him and we checked down. And he wouldn't hit those symptoms, because he made eye contact, he was social, you know, he didn't stem. He didn't have significant sensory issues, or it was sensory avoidance issues. We didn't realize it could be sensory if he was a sensory seeker. And I'll talk about that in a minute, too. So, you know, when you feel like there's so much more awareness out there for those classic symptoms

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of

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autism, but not as much for the non class classic when it comes to more behavioral. That's where I don't feel like there is as much awareness and that's where you start to get into the struggles of people not understanding and thinking. It's a parenting problem. It's a discipline problem. And I don't want to sound ages here. I'm not trying to beat people up. I think it's just a matter of not enough awareness out there and there wasn't as much research 20 years ago. So I think when you when you are dealing with a sound like my teenager here that is like okay, Boomer, but when you're dealing with kind of the boomer generation, and older you know, there just wasn't as much research back then. So when they think of autism, they think of Rain Man. And so it's hard for them to see kids, maybe their grandkids or maybe, you know, kids out in public who are having a complete meltdown or a tantrum, they just think they're just bad. Or they're, you know, they need more discipline, they need that wooden spoon. They need more beatings and not as much awareness that some of these behavioral things are a result of a difference in their brain. Not because They're just trying to pitch a fit and manipulate you. And so that was more the case with our son. And so it was so confusing those first few years having to navigate that, and so I'm going to share kind of go back. So for our son, he was definitely a sensory seeker. Very hyperactive. So if anything, I just thought he was going to be diagnosed with ADHD for sure. And also, I think, because we came from, you know, I came from a family of girls. So like, my family and I were not used to boys at all. My husband, however, came from watts boys. And so he always kind of chalked it up to he's a boy, you know, this is this is typical boy. But then there was some other personality traits as well. Things that you do see in autism to kind of that stubbornness trait, what you call, I think they call it rigidity, or in flexibility. Definitely, the stubbornness was always there. Also, preferred interests, definitely my son had obsessions from the start still does, you know, favorite toys, and those were the only toys. And of course, he did do the lining them up, play appropriately sometimes, but usually, everything was lined up in order. What else were the symptoms? You know, I think I just remember doing the little mommy and me classes with my church and my friends and you know, doing playdates, they go to the church, Sunday school class, and all the other kids, you know, you could give them instructions, even even a year old, even at 14 months old. The other kids would fall right in line and do what they were supposed to do. And our son who was like, he is gonna do what he wanted to do, he went and sitting at the table and eating his Cheerios, and he wasn't gonna, I mean, first of all, there was a language barrier, but we didn't know that at the time. So understanding was one issue, but it was also part of that stubbornness trait as well. So he just came off looking as undisciplined, hyperactive, you know, more behavioral issues. And it was a real struggle for me. So the next thing I'm going to kind of go off on for just a moment is those feelings of guilt, those feelings of inadequacy as a parent that you can kind of go through on this journey. So navigating that the social life and the trying to still have mommy friends and kind of fit in with society, with a child that's kind of difficult to take out in public, it's it really wears on you started having just, I was such a social person. So I really thrive on, you know, getting out and doing things with friends. But I was getting to where it was just, I feel so much anxiety every time I had to go anywhere with my son. And part of it was just because I knew nobody understood. And I always felt like,

Unknown Speaker 8:17

What is wrong with me? Why am I the only parent who just can't seem to control their kids? Like, I remember telling a friend like, why is it everything just seems so much harder for me? I think that was right about it was a little after two, maybe two and a half. And he also was not talking a lot. Now. He would talk he was saying words, but it was like one word at a time. Here's another pet peeve. Our pediatrician. When I had brought forth to him that I was concerned about our son not talking enough, he handed me a sheet and told me to go through and check off each month. If he wasn't saying, you know, like, 80% of those words or something? Well, I would check them off every month. He was saying every one of the words he should have been saying developmentally. The problem was he was not putting the words together. So he was not making conversations. He wasn't. He didn't have the social and language piece. And there's a difference between language and speech. His speech was fine. He was saying words, he was articulating them correctly. He just didn't have the language. And with autism, it does tend to a lot of times be it's a language disorder that you see. So he kept getting older. I was seeing Okay, he's making the speech. So it took us a long time to really get to the bottom of that, that it's a language thing and our pediatrician was no help. He held us completely behind he was that anyway, I'll stop. Bottom line. I pushed and finally demanded that he be, you know, get tested on his speech or language. I had autism in the back of my mind. Because I didn't know a few people who had been diagnosed. But I just prayed and prayed it wasn't that I kept thinking of is just just just a delay. And we just got to get a speech and catch him up. So went in probably finally after like being on the waiting list, getting referrals, fighting with my pediatrician, all those frustrations, we finally got him in for testing pretty close to three years old. It was like, maybe a couple months before his third birthday, and went in with the speech therapist who evaluated him. She gave us the results. And she said, so I'm putting down language disorder. And I asked her, Well, what does that mean exactly? Is this just a delay? Or is this an actual when you say disorder, what are you, you know, the word disorder scared me. And she very calmly and politely said, Well, this is something we see a lot in autism. As soon as she said that word.

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I

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nodded, tried to be brave, tried to, you know, act professional, and accept it but I just lost it and

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broke down in tears. Right then I still remember that day. I'm gonna cry thinking about it. I was just devastated. And so, hold on. Let me let me pick myself up a little bit here. Okay, I'm better.

Unknown Speaker 11:42

Okay, so basically that kind of started our path from there.

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