should I take my daughter her assessment?

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Hiya,

My daughter JJ has just turned eleven. For the first 9-10 years, it didn’t really seem that different from other kids, but in the last couple of years I have begun to wonder if she has AS.

JJ has always had quirks. She is a stickler for sticking to the rules even if the rules aren’t really being enforced. At the pool, she will stand in the usual queuing area for the diving boards waiting for the lifeguard to tell him it is her turn, even if is not in operation, getting really upset and seeming unable to adapt. She gets really anxious about things, and when trying something new gets upset (bordering on hysterical sometimes) if she can’t get it right. For example, she has been learning to play a clarinet, but when she gets a new piece to practice will burst into tears if she can’t play it straight away. I can point out that new pieces always need to be learnt, and that making mistakes happened with the last piece as well but she has mastered it now, but that does not seem to alleviate the distress.

She is really good at Maths and Science but struggles with English a lot, in particular her lack of fine motor control means her handwriting is terrible. Yet her speech and vocabulary has always seems advanced for her age. She struggles to tie her shoelaces and can’t throw or catch a ball, yet swims really well.

She has always has special interests, some of which coincide with other kids others which don’t. But she has to learn ‘everything’ about the subject. For example, when they started showing a new series of a TV programme (Dr Who), she became hooked like some her friends, but none of them were interested in the original black and white episodes from the 1960s, yet JJ wanted to know everything. My brother bought him a reference book that listed every single storyline in the last 40 years. She read it over and over again. So many times the book fell apart. Then she dropped the topic and overnight she lost interest in all the toys, books and DVDs she had collected.

She also sometimes seems to have difficulty understanding my body/facial expressions. Sometimes she asks me if I am cross with him when she walks into a room, as if I just look up at him she is not sure.

She does have friends she plays with, and makes good eye contact and is a very huggy child, who communicates well most of the time. But it is the level of anxiety and distress at certain times which seems to me that it is more than just a personality quirk. Most of the time, she seems happy and ok with things, and I also worry that if I took him for an assessment she would feel that I thought there was something ‘wrong’ with him, and what if it is just my imagination?

Is it always the best thing to check for a diagnosis? Sorry for the long post but any advice would be great.

I can't tell from what you've said but for me, things got worse the older I got so I think it's probably worth getting assessed sooner rather than later to give your daughter the best chance in life. There are lots of things that take too long to figure out if you're left to your own devices and you end up kinda wasting years of your life because of it.

My obsessions did tend to be quite sporadic although I never made eye-contact until I was 17 and wasn't touchy-feely at all. I can't remember whether I understood facial expressions but truthfully, I don't think I looked most of the time. The trouble is that everyone is so different it's really difficult to tell.

Sam