Could my daughter have aspergers aswell?

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Hi

I'm new to this forum and have a question for you out there with aspie daughters. We just recently started to suspect that my husband has aspergers, and seeing how all of "our problems" were explained and also some what easier to deal with due to better understanding of eachother we turned our eyes to our 8 year old daughter.

She has always been exceptionally clever, never playing with toys, actually asked for her first computer turning 2 with the motivation "you said I could ask for 1 really big thing". She liked mazes and the computor but that's about it. She can't play pretend games, but she could mimic a movie like a cartoon and turn it into playing but everything has to be exactly like the film. She also never quite got along with the sibblings, often praying dramatically to be born again without them. But she is really caring, I was in wheelchair being pregnant and sometimes she was more caring than my husband, asking how I were and if I was in pain and such.

Well anyways she started school and all hell broke loose, we didn't understand what was wrong, she was ill, she was crying, she was stalk naked on a pile of wood in the yard in the middle of the winter screaming her lungs out, she didn't want to go to school. After 1,5 year we found out she was bullied in school and all the stories of friends where more or less lies, motivated to the teacher later on as "I didn't want to make mum sad, she loves school" (I'm a teacher.)

We moved her to a small private school, a confessing christian school that specialises in helping kids with problems of social kinds.
Now she said to me the other day "I have started playing much more now that I have changed school, befor I only knew one game, that was "hide and seek", now I have learnt how to play other games aswell, like "playing house" and also "pretending we are hamsters", befor I didn't understand those games, I didn't know where to be and where my bed was in the "house" and how many were going to be apart of the game. In my new school I can ask and they tell me and I play a lot more now"

This sounds kind of "odd" to me, clever, but socially odd, could it be that she has asperger aswell? The teachers said that when they found out about my husband being an aspie they looked more closely on her behaviour, and when I asked what they thought about her they said that well maby she had traits but that didn't have to mean anything and that she could learn how to deal with life anyways, and also that they couldn't be sure cause things were going just great. She is at the top of her class and excells in everything, their only concern was maby that she tends to drift of in class never raising her hand for questions and so on.

Other things I have noticed, she doesn´t eat food that's "wet", never did, even as a baby. She collects trash, lika cardboardboxes and really trows a fit if I try to sort some of it out. She collects sertain toys like Petshops but rearly play with them they just stand there. She loves math but has little interests in other subjects, they were in the forest with school looking for is it called fungi?chantarells and stuff and she said it wasn't interesting cause she asked the teacher for the name of one of them and she didn't know it so she stopped lissten. That also made me wonder, I had an aspie student once who fell asleep if things didn't spike his interest.

Well this post is way too long but my mind is filled with "could it be" and in that case "what should one do, if anything, about it" and so on.
My highest concern is that she often is so lonely even within the family due to difficulty understanding the sibblings, if they for instance scare her like jumping out from a corner she really gets upset not really understanding that its "supposed" to be a joke. When the neighbour boy said he was going to set a trap for my son (as part of a game) putting bottle caps with the "sharp" side up, on the ground, she went to my son and forbidd him to ever play with the "dangerous neighbour boy" who "threthend to kill her brother", I told her it's a game they are playing, she just looked at me really seriously saying, "no he said it was a trap, it was not a game"

Here I go again, this post will be way to long.
But if you are out there and this sounds familiar to you please advise me as to how you have dealt with this, if it sounds like nt childrens behaviour because children are different or if it could be aspie traits.

It could be for me but I'm not a specialist.

Welcome Lauran! So much of this sounds so similar to my daughter, who has been diagnosed. The interesting thing is that it presents quite a bit differently in girls than boys and is a bit harder to recognize. Before my daughter's diagnosis her teachers and even her pediatrician gave us a big gray "well maybe she has some symptoms" when I asked. But when I took her for testing the psychologist said she was so severe that she was having trouble deciding whether to diagnose her with Aspergers or classic autism, and went with Aspergers simply because she is extremely intelligent. Since the diagnosis, as we've been getting various treatments, the specialists in autism spectrum have all agreed she is one of the most severe cases they've seen....so we've gone from a big "well maybe she has a few symptoms" to "severe Aspergers".

I think the difference for girls is that girls tend to be more social. So my daughter will approach other children, but then doesn't quite know what to do and will end up running off or else playing next to the children instead of interacting. She can start a conversation but has trouble maintaining it unless it's one of her favorite topics, in which case she will dominate the conversation and no one else can get a word in. She desperately wants friends and tries her hardest to make friends...and sometimes she can even make a friend for a whole recess but she can't maintain the relationship longer term.

Also, she does really well on affect recognition tests where, for example, she is shown a picture of someone that shows a certain expression and she is asked to describe what a person is thinking (she actually tested in the 97th percentile on this....extremely well). But then when she was asked to think of another scenario that the person could be thinking, she couldn't (she scored in the 5th percentile on this part). So she has studied people in social situations and can recognize a similar expression and what that meant...but to her, every time someone makes a similar expression they must be thinking the same exact thing as the last time she saw it.

The third thing that I think is different for her as a girl is that she CAN make eye contact in situations where she is comfortable. So if she is with a trusted adult, her eye contact will be a little sporadic or unusual but she will make eye contact. Same thing when she is playing with one or two children that she knows and is comfortable around. But you put her in a new situation and she will walk in circles and stare at the ground or the sky when she talks.

I think the best way I've found to describe how she's picked these skills up is the fact that every day after school, she comes home and tells stories of "what the humans at school do", as if she is conducting some sort of field study. She WANTS to fit in, she WANTS to have friends...and so she studies the "humans" and intellectually applies her findings to attempt social interaction. But it is all done very methodically and does not by any means come naturally to her.

It sounds to me like getting your daughter tested certainly wouldn't hurt. From what I have understood from folks in the field, girls tend to really start to struggle in about 3rd grade, especially academically. The reason for recognition at this stage is that it starts to impact school work....in about 3rd grade there is a shift from straight memorization and repetition (thing aspies are GREAT at) to more abstract thought and inference making at school (really difficult). If she is an aspie, having the diagnosis to gain cooperation from the school will likely make a big difference in the really near future since your daughter is 8.

Sounds like it to me. I happy she's doing so well at her new school but I agree with the above poster so she can keep up the wonderful progress.

Welcome to WP Patience, education, compassion.

By all means get her evaluated, I agree she sounds like a prime candidate for AS.

About the jumping out thing: Anyone who suffers from a disorder that causes hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli and near-constant levels of high anxiety is more prone to being startled than the average person when surprised with sudden spikes in levels of stimulus (particularly SOCIAL stimulus) - and as a result more likely to perceive such intentional pranks as an ATTACK, rather than a joke. That sort of shock is physically PAINFUL to an autistic and not amusing in the least.

My last ex-wife used to get mad at me for jumping if she walked into a room unannounced and approached me from behind. She seemed to take it as a personal insult, as if I were alarmed because she was physically frightening. She could never comprehend that I jumped because the sudden unexpected appearance of a living being felt to me as though I'd been zapped with a cattle prod.

Thank you all for your replies. In a way they are really comforting and in another a bit frightening. It's maby like that always when you step into the unknown but I feel scared about what will happen when I call the school nurse to tell her about my concerns. Scared about....actually I don't know. Don't even know what's part of the process, maby it's the process of getting her "evaluated" that scares me or her being "labled" changing things for the worse, changing her life..."you are like this" and that it will hold her back and change the ways ppl look at her forever...and that it will be my fault for raising the question when the school "thought" everything was ok.

What have you all experienced that do have children who have been evaluated properly and who has AS. When it wasn't a huge problem to start out with did it help or turn things wose?

What if the nurse thinks I'm a horrible parent for even asking.
I have already called her once since my girl hit puberty when she was 7 (it's genetic that way in our family) the nurse hardly believed me and if I call now and say, hi remember me....I wonder if not only she has hit puberty but also has AS
omg.
I think much to much about what other ppl may think

It's not easy being a parent....but worth it

Ah yes, we get this sort of question fairly often here on this message board. Allow me to provide you with the standard advice:

Terms like Asperger syndrome do not accurately describe anybody. I can assure you that I myself am weird, at least weird enough that I do not fit into typical society the way most people do. But yet trying to describe me with labels would be an exercise in futility. I can not be accurately described as having autism, or having AS, or being normal, or anything like that because I am simply too complicated to be stuffed into a yes or no check box.

Likewise, everybody else in the world (including your child) can not be accurately described with just one label. Trying to determine whether or not your child has asperger's syndrome is like trying to draw a line where the ocean ends and the beach starts. The ocean edge is constantly changing due to waves, tides, erosion, etc. Likewise trying to pin down something as complex as a human's personality with discreet little terms wont work.

So, does your child have asperger's syndrome? Maybe, maybe not. The diagnostic criteria is incredibly vague and open to interpretation by the diagnosing doctor. Some people might say yes, others might say no, it really depends on what the diagnosing doctor's criteria is, and how he perceives your child.

What is important here is not what label your child receives, but what you do with this information. If you read about asperger's syndrome, and it helps you to be a better parent, and allow your child to have a more enjoyable and productive life, then who cares what they are labeled with. If getting a label helps out with school then I would say go for it. If getting the label wont help in school, then dont bother.

Labels are merely descriptions that can be used to better understand your child. They are not definitions, or constraints. So all that to say, trying to say whether or not your child has AS really doesnt matter because no two people with or without AS are alike. What matters is what you do with the information you collect. Treat your child based on the individual person they are, not what they are labeled with.

@ Tracker. Very well written.

Last edited by DenvrDave on 19 Oct 2009, 8:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The knowledge that came with the diagnosis changed everything for us. For the better. My son responds to a different way of parenting and schooling. I don't know if I could have come to that without trying out things I've learned in places like this. And I wouldn't have visited places like this if I hadn't heard the word.



She won't. Well, unless she wants to coast and never have to do her job, in which case it doesn't matter what she thinks. Good parents ask questions. Good parents test out ideas and look for better paths. Good parents are proactive for their kids, finding solutions before problems explode. Um, well, good parents TRY to do all of the above, at least -- I don't think any of us actually succeed, but the point is, she should respect you for asking.

Sounds like aspergers to a T.

It's such a shame for her, I really hope your daughter finds happiness in school in future.