Joint Attention and Sharing Interest

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Hello All,

I have a 2 years 10 month old boy having ASD. He was diagnosed 6 months back. I work on various skills and play with him. He is not in any other therapy. He has improved a lot in terms of speech. He knew only few words 6 months back which he only named and was not interested in toys. Now he uses single words to communicate his needs both nouns and action words, learned few social skills like greeting, waving hands etc. He likes to play with toys and sings nursery rhymes. He has started pretend play and imitation as well. I am happy to see his progress, but still he is very much in his own private world unless someone engage him forcefully or he is in need of something. He still does not communicate for any other reason than his needs (food, activities, toys...). If left alone he will talk himself, sing himself, play himself and never bother about people around . I feel his IQ is fine, he is very curious about non living world, figure out things fast and on his own, but social skills are poor.

He has less eye contact and no sharing interest. In terms of joint attention, he definitely pays attention to what is said to him if I grab his attention, but rarely looks at my face. His eyes will be always on the object involved. We look at books together. He will look at where I am pointing, both on books and things around. He will point on books, but will point to things around only to a 'where' prompt. For his needs he ask verbally most of time or drag people to what he wants. He will point only if prompted to point. The limited pointing he does is a trained skill. He picks up what I try to teach him very quick. He responds to me well, but still not with anyone else. He ignores others if they try to engage him. But will approach anyone for his own needs

My question is will he develop these skills? Is it just delayed? If not developed at all, will that mean more severely autistic and less functioning? What can I do to promote such skills?

Please share your thoughts.

Thanks in Advance
sresree

Honestly, this is par for someone diagnosed at the younger ages. The more you engage with him on things he is interested in, the more he will expand his horizons, and the more likely he will (selectively) pick up interests of yours.

Play and conversation is the best thing at this age. Read to him, show him pictures and discuss them with him even if he does not respond back. Receptive speech typically is far ahead of expressive speech at this stage and he is understanding, learning and soaking up way more than what he is able to express. Expressive speech can sprout up in a big burst. My son was very taciturn at that age, and frankly now he rarely is quiet.

His first speech will probably be more echolalia than original speech. He may plug and play phrases he has heard before rather than constructing new conversational speech of his own. This is a normal speech development pattern and those who do this, tend to do it for awhile (years, even) and original speech can occur seemingly all at once,or in stages. Again - normal.

Some (not all) autistic children are also hyperlexic, meaning they read early, but often later have issues with reading comprehension. Kids who do may also really, really like letters, numbers and logos. It is not the majority of children and if your child does not do this --do not worry-- If anyone tells you there is a need to worry if your child is not an early reader, that is nonsense, which is the only reason I am mentioning it, since it was not in your original post or in case you did not think to mention it, as it is rare enough that people don't think to mention it sometimes.