Autism Symptoms

Making Sense of Autistic Spectrum Disorders

The symptoms of ASD fall into four areas:

1. Difficulty relating to others – The failure to connect troubles parents more than any other symptoms of ASD. Parents describe their child as being “in their own little world. Our child is among us but not with us.”

2. Atypical language - Unusual speech patterns like monotone voice, odd pitch, repetitive language (echolalia), difficulty with pragmatic language (understanding social cues in conversation), neologisms (creating new words), and unusual sentence structures.

3. Repetitious behavior - Repetitive behaviors can include hand-flapping, rocking, toe wiggling, body freezing, pacing, nail biting, and repeating words or phrases.

4. Abnormal sensory and motor processing - Over-sensitivity to stimuli like loud noises, bright lights, or certain textures, under-sensitivity to stimuli, needing strong input to notice something, difficulty with motor planning and coordination, leading to clumsiness, poor balance and postural control textures or smells, sensory seeking behaviors like constant movement or roughhousing.

Common Sensations Experienced by Children with Autism

Dr. James Coplan

• Hearing – Extreme variable responses to sound. They may appear deaf, but have very acute hearing. Children with ASD often cover their ears in anticipation of a loud or unpleasant sound.
• Vision – Children with ASD are drawn to the same visual patterns spinning objects, or geometric patterns.
• Touch – Children with ASD crave deep pressure and yet hate clothing tags touching their skin. They usually hate anything that drips on their clothing or anything on their hands.
• Smell – Children with ASD will often sniff objects as a way to explore them. They are acutely sensitive to certain smells.
• Pain – They will often have an increased threshold of pain or a decreased threshold of pain.
• Food Selectivity – In children with ASD this can go far beyond “Picky” one child might like cold and crunchy with another likes sticky and gooey and another might eat foods that are only green. Some may not want their food to ever touch on the plate and they eat one thing at a time.
• Fear – Some children with ASD are fearless, running into the street, or climbing onto high structures with no hesitation. Some children however are afraid of wind blowing or leaves falling off the trees.
• Motor Clumsiness – Many children with ASD are clumsy and awkward and are unable to execute fine motor tasks quickly or accurately and the reasons are not clear as to why this happensyou navigate through the obstacles0f autism.