Aspies For Freedom

Just out of curiosity, how many of you had "easy" babies who were later diagnosed on the spectrum? My son was the easiest baby on earth. He slept 12 hours each night, took two very predictable long naps during the day, ate anything we gave him, reached all his milestones at the appropriate times, didn't care what he was wearing or what kind of sheets he slept on, etc. The only thing I can point to now that we realized early on was that he was easily overstimulated. For example, we had a mobile that he loved to look at, but we could only put it up for about ten minutes a day (i.e, we had to put it up, let him enjoy it for a brief amount of time, and take it down--rather than just leave it attached to the crib). He also would completely melt down if he didn't get his nap on time--like if we were out running errands and late getting home. Other than that, he was a breeze. He was speaking so clearly by such an early age that he could easily tell me what he wanted or needed, which meant none of the frustration-based tantrums my friends' kids were regularly having.

Jump forward 3 years and he's more difficult than any other child his age that I know. He melts down ten, fifteen, twenty times a day, shoves/hits/kicks his baby brother, screams and has fits when we try to get him to do something he doesn't want to do (like wait just one second while I put my shoes on before going outside to play), etc. Is it common for an AS child to get so much more difficult with age? I thought I'd read somewhere that autism peaked around age two, but my son's symptoms have definitely increased since his third birthday. Of course, he does not have a diagnosis--I'm just guessing he's AS based on everything I've read (and I've read a lot).

i'm not a perent but i rememer what i was like to be a child with unknown AS. your son metdown that often he probly very frustated (i dont know your son but most of my meltdown are frustration based ie un able to explain to a teacher what problems  i'm having)that he cant tell you whats wrong , for some children and adults with AS have VERY hard time expesing ther feelings verbally.

does any of this sound like your son?

barnburner-

My oldest was SUCH an easy baby! Just like you described actually. She's not diagnosed with anything as of yet, and she may never be, I've decided that I'm not all that great at DXing my kids...

But the same thing as far as slipped right into a routine by herself, even enforced it in the ways you described. Naptime was at 2, if we were still out at 2, there was bound to be trouble. But definitely more sensitive to stimulation than other babies seemed to be. I became the snobby mom who assumed the other kids were just rotten.

Though now, at five we are having trouble too. I don't know if they are normal problems for kids, AS or NT. Her sensitivity has grown into a rather large sensitive, dramatic monster. Any drama, large or small has a rather large reaction... I needed to stop by the store on the way home from school and I'm sure the neighboring cars could hear the moaning, they definitely saw the flailing of the arms. If her little sister grabs a toy she was playing with she is distraut... she goes to her room and cries. She complains of the smells of stores and the sounds their crowds make. She is afraid of amost anything and is known to jump into streets to avoid a neighborly dog/cat/squirrel. Hmm... now I seem to be convincing myself she is on the spectrum.

To the opposite end- she loves kids, doesn't always understand boys though. She doesn't have a selfish bone in her body and gets mad at me when I tell her little sister no. "But you have more crackers mommy, and she wants them!" This summer she became the idol of ther 3YO sis's playgroup- she was their mother hen. She always has a smile on her face, expresses every though and feeling in her head (though not without some prodding on the big ones) She also can't focus on anything for more than a minute, definitely not a perservator!

I definitely agree with the early talking thing though! I had an early talker and a late talker... and ages 1-3 with the early talker was marvelous! The late talker was always screaming about something... but I never knew what! Now that she talks though I've discovered she actually has quite the cheery disposition!

Wow, I am so long-winded!

The thing I always got as a kid was, "Smile...it's not so bad!" This was from strangers who (I guess?) were trying to cheer me up in some way (by picking on me!) because they mistook my serious expression for misery or unhappiness. I hated it and would never say such a thing to anybody ever. To this day I don't understand how someone can go around smiling at everybody. I have just learned in the last couple of years that it's nice to smile at someone when I greet them. But it's still very forced for me. I do it (like, say, to a checker at a supermarket who is ringing up my groceries), but it's very calculated, and I'm well aware that I'm only doing it because I think it will make that other person comfortable. Half the time I second guess myself and think that person might see me as insincere, or as some kind of dingbat. I'm terrible at any kind of social interaction, which is why I am very sympathetic to my son. But I do wish I'd been able to master this stuff at some earlier point in my life, so I wouldn't have had to spend so many years struggling to do the simplest things. This is why I'd like to help him now, while he's still young. Just don't really know how.

I've read about some AS babies being easy but my son was a nightmare baby, so difficult.  He was EXTREMELY fractious, only slept for 2-3 hours at a time before waking up screaming, he was diagnosed with lactose intolerance at four months old and was covered in eczema which didn't help, but he didn't stop screaming until he was almost 4.  Everything terrified him, people, animals, sunlight, wind, leaves rustling, even a bit of fluff in the bath water, you name it, he was petrified of it.  At eight months old he would hit himself on the head if strangers approached him, he also had a extreme attachment to me and would go demented if anyone else tried to hold him.  Eventually he was seen by child mental health professionals and diagnosed with seperation anxiety disorder and social phobia, the psychologists said he presented with very deep seated and primitive anxiety, he was subsequently diagnosed with AS.

As he has grown he is no less difficult, he has lashed out verbally and physically at school, and towards me, he has a very complex and highly strung personality, he is still very active and nothing seems to satisfy him, he is so intense (but then, so am I!)  On the plus side, I do adore him and he can be very funny and amusing, he is unique, but easy he ain't!

So symptoms of autism continue to increase with age? That would suggest that an AS child would, by adulthood, have a very difficult time living in the world. If the symptoms never "peak," wouldn't an autistic person eventually be basically catatonic due to continually escalating problems? There has to be a point where it ceases to increase in severity, no?

I'd always heard that babies on the spectrum tended to be "difficult"--crying a lot, not sleeping well, picky eaters, etc., which is why I asked my question. I grew up next door to an HFA boy who pretty much never stopped crying his whole first year. It was that crying that led his mother to consult doctors about his development. Nobody could see any issues with my son's development until he started to talk, and even then they only pointed out how advanced his language was. Nobody ever suggested--not a doctor, not a speech therapist or preschool teacher--that there could be something "wrong." By the age of two, all hell broke loose. Once my son moved out of a crib and into a regular bed, he would destroy his bedroom every single day. He'd throw the contents of his dresser around the room, break the shades off his windows, cram his toys between his headboard and the wall, and on and on. We eventually had to lock up all his clothes in the closet just to keep him from trashing the room day after day. It was a pretty dramatic change from the baby who had been regular as the day is long. I certainly don't think it has anything to do with vaccinations, but I do wonder if going from the security of being held all the time (as babies are before they can crawl/walk) and going from sleeping in a crib to walking around and being "free" in his own room led to feelings of anxiety that made him act out? I have no idea, but it's interesting.

I don't think symptoms of autism increase with age, rather they change and evolve  over time.

I also think autistic people have a different way of developing... some things earlier than others and some things later. So they are still developing, just not the same way as their peers. So while one may be very advanced with language skills they may be dealing with emotions and social problems that their peers were dealing with a few years previously.

I agree that the symptoms won't get increasingly worse.  I've heard about that symptoms peaking thing too, and I really don't know what it means.  I think as a person gets older, they compensate better, so even if symptoms worsened, they'd be compensated for, and you wouldn't necessarily know (another reason it's harder to diagnose AS in adults rather than kids).

My daughter was a very easy baby in some ways.  She slept through the night at age six WEEKS (whereas I was expecting that at six months or so).  She did have a sort of colicky problem, but we gave her some type of gas medicine that seemed to work very well.  She ate a wide variety of baby food, but had to be entertained to a really ridiculous level in order to do it.  I have pictures of all of the toys and books on the floor around her high chair that she would "go through" in the course of a meal.   She did take two lovely long naps for a long time, then went down to one, and now she is four years old and naps are history.  She has a very short list of foods that she will eat.

I guess the thing is that I don't really know what differentiates an easy from a hard baby, as she was my first, so I just took whatever she evinced as normal.  She was a late talker, but was speaking in short sentences by the time she was three.  Now she's a great talker, but still mixes up her pronouns.

I think my parents raised us (three Aspies and two NTs) with such an extreme level of discipline, but love and respect based discipline, that we did not have meltdowns.  My parents seemed to be just nearly perfect, humble Christians, and I always wanted to do the right thing to make them proud of me.  I have tried to raise my daughter the same way, so far.  She behaves MUCH better around me than around her dad, because she knows my rules, and follows them, whereas he doesn't have any rules, and doesn't pay near as much attention to her as I do.  I definitely pay TOO MUCH attention to her, born from a desire to give her all of the love and security that I could from birth, and then greatly increased by my reading of Greenspan's Engaging Autism when she turned three, where he basically recommends being engaged with the child CONSTANTLY, following her interest.  
As an unemployed stay at home mom with two friends to my name, I do have all the time in the world to devote to her, and it seems to pay off.

All three of my babies were what are called 'good babies'.
They all slept well, my daughter to well in that she would sleep for 12 hours & lost weight through  accidental starvation, in the end I had to wake her two hourly to feed her & get her weight up & to increase my milk supply which was starting to go through insufficient use.
I was looking at baby pics today, all smiled & had no eye contact issues.
My oldest son was very late to walk, but climbed from a very early age.
My daughter never crawled, she pulled herself along with her elbows, dragging her legs behind her.
My oldest son had one tantrum which was in town, I put him over my shoulder & carried on as if nothing had happened, he never had another.The others didn't have tantrums.

There was nothing with any of them to indicate anything abnormal, until John was aged 8, but I wasn't looking for anything.
I suspect, being likely AS myself, I accepted things as normal that may not have been.

Mixed bag here.  Three children, three personalities, all ASD.

I've often felt that some of the posts at this board give AS credit where it is not due or blame AS when it is not necessarily culpable.  There is just plain old human variability at work as well.

Wow, blessed, you deserve a medal!

I'm speechless! A big feet if you've read my other posts!

I supposedly was an easy baby; didn't cry much etc. I didn't sleep through the night until I was 3-4yo or so, when my mom finally was told to give me something to eat immediately before bedtime.

My husband talked with his dad the other day and found out that he cried a lot.

My brother threw up a lot after every meal until he was over 6 months old. Dunno whether he was easy or hard otherwise.

My son seems to be taking after his father... He'll be 5 weeks old tomorrow and has been doing a lot of crying. The first week he was easy though; slept too much. Anyway,  I've been trying dairy free for just over a week now because the most common cause of colic supposedly is cow's milk allergy, but so far no luck. My human lactation textbook says that improvement should occur in 3-8 days if that's the problem, although occasionally it may take longer. I used to consume a lot of dairy, so perhaps I'll be one of those cases where it takes a bit longer, but I'm afraid that it's going to prove to be a futile effort. At least I'll be able to uncelebrate with ice-cream and such.  His sleeping pattern is still pretty much unpredictable but sometimes he'll sleep 6 hours straight, which is nice. His pooping is annoying... he'll poop some, and then some more a few minutes later, and then another few minutes later, etc etc etc. Then he might quit for an hour or so, and then the same thing again... keeping him in a clean diaper for longer than half an hour is pretty much impossible.

They say that autists often have big heads... my son's body weight and head circumference at birth were both at around the 90th percentile or so, whereas his height was more like the 50th percentile. Of course, we don't know yet whether he's going to be autistic or not, but he's at an increased 'risk', considering his family history.

Other eccentricity: he doesn't have that newborn grasp... in the first couple of weeks he'd grab stuff you put in his hands but let go of it very easily, and now he sometimes will grab something you put in his hands and sometimes won't. I've got long hair and people have been warning me to keep it away from him but it totally isn't a problem when he grabs it. Whereas with other babies that I've known it's almost impossible to get your finger back after they grab it, which iiuc is normal the first couple of months.

I have AS and my mother says I was worse than all three of my brothers put together. She says that I did not cry, but screamed and she swears that she thought everyone was going to go deaf from it.  She also says if you took it personaly I was a very mean baby.  I was also a foster child and the adoption process was not final until I was four years old and I was constaltaly having to go see my mentaly chalanged biological mother who thought I was a toy. Up until I was about 10 months or so I was constantaly being put in foster home after foster home and none of them could tolerate me for one night. Maybe being a foster child and being bounced around so much had something to do with it.