RE: Kids w/ Classic Autism, PDD-NOS & Speech Delays

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Hes doing pretty well with his PECS. If he had speech it would be annoying because he would be saying 'chips' 'popcorn' 'biscuit' 'drink' constantly
He verbalises lots. I think he just gave up talking for some years, I can't imagine why he would not ever talk. Thats not the same as saying he will talk, but I still think he will, he's learning new skills and learning to enjoy people.

Some kids with autism have selective mutism, also, a psychiatric condition where anxiety prevents the person from speaking, particularly in social situations--school, daycare, etc. Sometimes the child will speak to only a couple of relatives. Sometimes (like my son) the child will have speech delays/cognitive issues and selective mutism. (Selective mutism is more common in kids with speech issues). It can even continue on into adulthood or evolving into Social Anxiety Disorder.

I had selective mutism as a child and was sent to the school counselor several times for not talking in first grade. However, my mother swears that I talked at home.

From what I have read, Prozac is 76% effective in treating selective mutism. It worked on my son! It made him very hyperactive for the first couple of weeks and we had to adjust the dose several times. However, he started trying to speak all of the time! (It generally wasn't correct speech--lots of echolalia, weak vocabulary, and inability to ask and answer questions--but it was easier to observe his speech difficulties and figure out what to work on).

I dont think nostromo's son has selective mutism, Im pretty sure, correct me if Im wrong, that he has late developing or "regressive" autism and is non verbal. This is where the child seems to progress normally then starts to loose skills and becomes profoundly or severely autistic. However many of these kids can regain some of the lost "skills" and can learn to speak or at least communicate even if it is with electronic devices. When my daughter was non verbal she babbled and made lots of noise and she picked up the PECS cards very quickly. She talks now (just turned 6) but only started speaking in sentences at age 4. We recently had a scare though where her speech was slipping and she was hardly speaking at all. We found the reason for her intense stress and once that was resolves she came back to us...so I guess that could have become a selective mutism state had we not investigated and corrected.

Just throwing the selective mutism idea out there for people who don't know about it and that a drug therapy--Prozac--has been scientifically researched and proven to work. Selective mutism is a psychiatric thing, so it can get worse or crop up when a child changes schools, starts daycare, or something happens that causes the child stress.

I have also heard of children appearing to regress due to sedation caused by too strong of a medication or changing from a good therapy program to one that is not so good.

Not to say that these are factors in this particular case, but a variety of people are reading the posts, and they may have something just a little different going on with their kids.

These posts brought back a memory of when my son's speech started slipping when he was about 18 months old. I had a job working out of the house that got busy all of a sudden at the same time that I became executrix of my grandfather's estate (quite a messy business). I got too busy and too tired to work with my son as much as I had been, and the limited speech that he had started slipping away over the course of a month.

I ultimately decided to quit the job in order to get my son back on track.

I think my kid speaks more than most his age but it's mostly non-communicative. Lots of jargon, lots of reciting letters and numbers (his obsession), lots of singing...lots of singing about letters and numbers!

We are trying to get him to be more communicative as right now he's only communicative when he wants something to eat or drink.

Last night we were practicing "What color is this?" Sometimes he answered correctly, but sometimes he answered with "It's what color is this." in an annoyed voice. I don't think he likes being drilled...

Both of my kids learned their ABCs and numbers early via children's videos--both my older child (now almost 7 with classic autism) and my younger son (about 3.75 years old with diagnosed OCD and some autism symptoms).

Loads and loads of tests were done on my older son, including a comprehensive IQ test by the local school system. (I have a law degree that I am not using and threatened legal action if they did not do something. This is how I got them to do the IQ test.)

The results of the school district IQ test on my son with classic autism: he scored well above 100 (average) on every area except two. He scored 70 (borderline "mentally deficient" or "mentally" ret*d) on information retrieval and 85 on short-term memory. Information retrieval is where the information is actually inside of the child's head but he/she has trouble pulling it out. You may be able to jog his/her memory with something visual, like written words or pictures, or specific (particularly multiple choice) questions. The school district IQ tester said that poor information retrieval and very different IQ scores on different sections of the test is common.

He did unusually well on a section involving picture word vocabulary (scoring an IQ of 128). He had been worked with on this extensively at home, though.

Anyway, the repeating stuff over and over sounds like echolalia, which my older son had.

In a different post, the child who is quiet as a mouse at school sounds exactly like me, with my childhood selective mutism. (I don't have it anymore, but public speaking is still often a disaster.) I did not talk at all in class in first grade and kept getting sent to the school counselor, but I could talk at home. There were also others (a neighbor child's mom, for instance), that I never talked to.

My son with classic autism had selective mutism, too, until we put him on Prozac and just under age 4. He had been worked with extensively on speech, and the Prozac turned him into an echolalia motor mouth overnight. The focus sort of went from getting him to speak to fixing his speech at that point.