Two year old - concern about Aspergers?

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Hello everybody.

I'm new to this forum. I've been casting around looking for someplace to post a question, and some concerns about my son. I'd like get a bit of feedback from somebody who has experience with young children who have Asperger’s (or what would probably be called “Asperger’s light”). Basically I'm wondering if I should be more concerned, or doing anything special. And at minimum, I’m wondering if anybody has any recommendations for how to handle his transition into school. Barring some major changes in his development pattern he’s not going to fit easily into a regular classroom.

About our little boy:

Physically, he is completely average - or maybe slightly above. He walked, ran, jumped and met all major physical milestones within the normal range. He didn't exhibit any of the deficiencies often associated with Aspergers.

By any definition he’s an intellectually gifted child, and he comes by it honestly. For whatever the numbers are worth, my wife and I have IQs of 150 and 145 respectively; we were also considered to be gifted children. And, for what it's worth, my wife and I were both considered kinda geeky.

I won’t detail it, but our son went through all of the cognitive and communication milestones extremely early. Certainly we’ve had many comments – mostly positive, but a few concerned, from other parents. My sister (who is a bit lacking in diplomacy) asked me if he had “rain man disease”, when the 20 month old boy rattled off his phone number, including area code.

On the positive, our 32 month old boy:

- has a genuinely beautiful personality - inquisitive, happy, and not at all pushy or temper-tantrum prone.
- has a very large vocabulary – several thousand words at least, and talks continuously, in very long and complex sentences.
- can read at what I think is a grade one level. He easily reads 500 words – many of them up to 10 letters long. He continuously asks us how to spell this word or that word.
- independently reads books like "Green Eggs and Ham", "Dick and Jane". He knows the normal left/right top/bottom sequence and properly modulates the tone of his speech to suit the sentences and paragraphs.
- can read all numbers up to 1000 well. He counts to well over 100, mostly limited by boredom. He counts back down to zero from 30, and from 100 with help. He also counts in German and French, although fewer numbers.
- knows time of day, days of the week, and associates them with events - swimming day, toy library day, suppertime, bedtime, get-up time etc...
- reads a digital clock very well, and an analog clock roughly.
- is just starting to do basic addition and subtraction.
- absolutely adores our computer. He will go into my office, turn it on, log-in, open word, paint, or click icons that link to the "Nick Jr." website, where he'll click through the pages, and open, play and close various young children's games. After drawing a typical toddler picture or typing a mix of words and gibberish, he'll use the software menus to print them out – usually many copies.

Now, the worrisome bits:

- He has an incredible obsession with numbers and counting. He'll sit in the back seat of my car and continuously report on my speed, direction of travel (from a compass mounted above the mirror), and temperature outside. When walking outdoors, nothing is more exciting than the numbers on the houses and cars. He'll happily recite the numbers off of every house or license plate that we pass - "Oh!! Look!! It's a four-hundred and twenty five".

- He's obsessed with time. If it's 3:24 and he's expecting something to take place at 3:30. He will monitor the time continuously and report it verbally every 30 seconds until 3:30 arrives.

- He's quite shy. It's not that he doesn't like other kids; he just kind-of ignores them, and is stays off in his own world. He doesn't usually take part in the ebb-and-flow of child-play. He's also not a "typical boy". He has limited interest in throwing balls, will get very excited if he gets dirty. He does like cars, trucks, trains etc…

- He's very intense and emotional and absolutely hates criticism. He never really throws tantrums – he just gets very upset when he feels disapproval.

- Finally... When I look on the net for information about kids with similar characteristics, I'll usually find an article about Asperger's syndrome. Obviously this fact5 alone causes a bit on concern. Both my wife and I are engineers, and Asperger's is reputedly much more common in kids of parents who are "technical" and "geeky".

So, my question is… am I worrying too much? As read through various articles on the Asperger’s, sometimes it fits, and sometimes it doesn’t. And I guess, the real question is… at what point is something like Asperger’s a problem, and at what point is it just a personality trait?

Steve

So, my question is… am I worrying too much? As read through various articles on the Asperger’s, sometimes it fits, and sometimes it doesn’t. And I guess, the real question is… at what point is something like Asperger’s a problem, and at what point is it just a personality trait?

a great question and problably one only an experienced diagnostician can answer, considering your son's age. If it were my child I would get an evaluation.

There are lots of on line tests for pdd-I think one is on childbrain.com. They are ment to screen possible pdd's.

hi read your report with interest.......i think there are some worrying trends there,
i am 34 male with AS my 4.5 yo son has it as well, i am diagnised he isnt but i know he has it.
try this............let your son sing a song.......bob the builder for example, sing it with him.........learn then words..over a few days learn the words, the tone the melody of the song and sing it with him..then one day when you sing it with him just place a word in there out of order...see his reaction, if he insists on correcting you then this can be normal.....if he insists on re-starting the whole song again and singing it correctly you may have a problem, and it is a problem it isnt a personality trait that you can hide and teach them to grow out off.......he is too young to get a formal diagnosis clinicians reckon around 8 or 9 for a formal diagnosis, depende which country you are in, what i would do if i were you is get your self and or your wife assesed first. this will shed more light on him having ot or not.
AS is a life long problem a serious problem no matter how mild it is.

That is very interesting! I was wondering the same thing myself about my 2 1/2 yr old.

Also, I was advised on these boards that I could get him dx'd at this age, but our ped said the same thing you did- that that doesn't happen until much later.

when i found brick walls with regard to getting an early diagnosis for my son, i started looking at my self..my father and my greater family.....it would appear i have discovered a crazy gene causing alcoholism, broken marriages abuse,in my family tree, the usual thinjgs now attributable to aspergers syndrome.....i have a strong index of suspicion about my son but no diagnosis, but in strong cases it can be diagnosed.. around 4 yars old the problem i found is that AS can be subtle until the problems of social interaction surface around 8 or 9 years old and then it is late to start top teach emotional and social skills.
it is such a new thing here in the UK that very few pwople are competent at it.....the craziest thing here is that as an AS male i dont have intuitive feelings about anything...except that i "know" intuitively that my son has it...its the only intuition i have felt, ever.

At two, my son was precocious with a huge vocabulary - how do I explain to a pediatrician about how he was giving ME directions on when/where to turn on country roads he had only visited once and that was several months ago.

The terrible twos? HAH!! The twos were incredible in the language and vocabulary discovery. He was the easiest two EVER.

Then he turned three.

I thought he was saving up.

Take pictures of your child and have others take pictures. He briefly attended a daycare and I had suspicions after a few weeks that something wasn't right. It was a gut thing - it just wasn't right and he wasn't even two and couldn't really tell me. Well, they took pictures and the photo - it was that POW look and he wasn't even two. He was only there a few weeks, but we knew something was wrong.

We both have degrees in English and never talked babytalk to him, we always read to him so we thought his vocabulary was OUR achievement. It was years later before I realized he didn't really KNOW what his vocabulary meant (hyperlexia).

You know the phrase - time to hit the hay - he looked for hay. I didn't know a thing about Asperger's but I thought of him as my $1.98 child. Hey, it's two bucks - mom, it's not $2.00, it's a dollar-ninety-eight.

He was always social with others, particularly older people. Railroad employees were impressed with his depth of knowlege on coal cars, hopper cars, etc. He was only three. He has always been a toe-walker and never, ever wanted to pick up a crayon. Later that turned into an issue with handwriting which you need to do math.

I don't think there's much you can do at 2 but if you're already explaining to him the WHY - why it's time to stop an activity, why you need to use inside voices and all sorts of WHY's, then be prepared to just keep doing it.

By age 5, they thought he was ADHD, but the hyperactivity turned out to be environmental. He needs to know why and then he's much better. But every little thing results in WHY. It's tiring but sometimes I learn from it. And for that, I'm glad. I've learned a lot from him and I appreciate that - at least when I'm not so tired from a day full of why's.

Paddlesteve~
boy, did your post hit home for me pretty hard. you could've been talking about my son....unfortunately for us, our son went through those stages back in 1994 &1995 when most drs were still unaware of aspergers. everything he did was chalked up to being gifted. our son didn't get diagnosed until the age of 13 when he started having MAJOR social issues. i would keep a close eye on social interactions, and try to help him through if it seems necessary. aspies are quite often the victims of bullying, and if you start out when he's young you might have a better chance of helping him....getting him into sports or scouts ( if he's interested), could help work on the social skills without seeming like it's really work.

Hi paddlesteve,

If, as you say, you and your wife both have IQs in the 145/150 range, it's not surprising that you have a pretty gifted little boy on your hands. I do honestly think most everything you describe can come with being gifted, and not necessarily from something like AS.

As others have said -- keep an eye on him as the good and conscientious parent you already sound like you are. He's only two and the next few years of development will show you much more of who he's going to be.

I'm an Aspie mom of two boys, one is autistic, one is supposed neurotypical and is potentially gifted. Some of what you describe at Aspie traits, I see some in my youngest son who is 3, I also see gifted traits. I would also suggest looking up Hyperlexia... often children will be obsessed with letters and numbers as well as reading with it. I would bring this stuff up to a development pediatrician or whatever and just see what they think, just because one has AS traits doesn't make it a bad thing but doesn't always make a full diagnosis either.

I noticed this is your first post here and you stated yourself as neurotypical. Aspies can be gifted as well as having AS, just like anything else. I'm honestly dismayed by your use of 'something like AS'... I found it to be rather almost negative. Being an Aspie or having AS traits is nothing to be ashamed of. We have our challenges and such but we do have our strengths that if you took AS from us, we'd likely not have. Look at Steven Spielberg, he's an Aspie and one of the greatest directors and film makers out there. Dan Aykroyd is another example of a famous Aspie. "Something like AS" for some of us means something great and something to be proud of because we're unique and different. And different is a good thing.

Pretty similar experience with my son - he was a very intelligent, agreeable 2yr old with a huge vocabulary and I though it was great. He wasn't quiet and aloof like some people say with their kids - although he could keep himself occupied (like having a fondness for taking things apart). I didn't realize that these were positive signs of AS (or HFA as my son has been diagnosed with). And he did the same thing with knowing the route to Grandma's after the first time we went there after she had moved. When he was three though he regressed and lost speech and began screaming about our porch stairs. The ped thought is was panic attacks - but I KNEW that he knew something was going on with the stairs that just wasn't apparent until my husband looked under the porch and found an ever so slight variance toward the back on one step on one side. (We have a porch where you can go up on the left or right). So - after that I figured he was going to be very sensitive like me. However, if I hadn't had those issues myself than no one would have looked at the porch and found out is was a sensory thing not a PA. We did not just accept the initial autism diagnosis though and saw several specialists, but when he was in preschool the difference was very apparent. I told the teacher about his speech issues and she said she had worked with children with autism before and felt that he was autistic. It wasn't that I had anything against being autistic (lol) but I have had issues since childhood and they were called other things. I found out later that AS is pretty recent and even autism had many stereotypes among professionals so kids who were not cognitively impaired were often diagnosed with other issues 20 to 30 years ago.

My sincerest apologies! I really did not mean it in a negative way; simply that it seemed too early to be specific, hence the generalization of "something." There are so many aspects of being both NT and not NT that can play in, you mention yourself hyperlexia. I could have written "something like giftedness" and meant the same thing.

Sorry again My ds (6) is currently in the assessment process, and I've been reading for a while to learn about others' experiences, so I shall be more careful with my relatively inexperienced mouth.