My 3 year old. Aspergers?

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I've been noticing certain things with my 3 year old son Aaron lately that really remind me of myself. I know that's a dumb thing to say cause he is my son but I mean things that remind me of my aspie tendencies. He usually listens to me pretty well but when I'm at work and he's with my fiance' he is a nightmare hitting and talking back as well.

I think I read somewhere that Aspergers and autism can sometimes be genetic and passed from one generation to another. I'm really starting to believe he may have some of the symptoms of Aspergers.

I walk on my toes frequently and have noticed he does the same a lot of the time. He is also super sensitive anytime we discipline him and will be in a funk and bad mood for awhile. He has no speech problems or anything but often has issues being around other children. We haven't brought him anywhere yet but we just want to figure this out if he might be an Aspie as well. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Given the genetic predisposition, it's very possible, but it's difficult to determine Asperger's at three. Kanner type autism, yes, but Aspie kids often look pretty NT until age 6, 7, or 8. I didn't give my family a whole lot of clues until I was about 7, and it wasn't obvious to teachers and psychologists until I was 10.

However, all that being said, he's your son and if he takes after you, then you'd be the one to know!

I bet your son would benefit a lot from a different discipline approach.
Especially with him being more emotionally sensitive, here is something to look into:
http://www.theparentvortex.com/wordpres ... pline-101/

I found these three books helpful at the preschool age:

Asperger Syndrome and Young Children: Building Skills for the Real World by Teresa Bolick
The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder by Carol Stock Kranowitz
Raising Your Spirited Child Workbook by Mary Sheedy Kurcinko (get the "Workbook" version)

Also, this sensory checklist would be a good starting place. If you check a lot of things other than "neutral", you could take it to an OT. http://sensorysmarts.com/sensory-checklist.pdf

ageed! But when I think back about my son, who didnt get his Aspergers diagnosis until close to 6, the signs were always there. Even at 3 and younger!

Thanks for the suggestions and keep them coming. Still working on figuring aspergers on my own for myself and now for my son so it's a lot of surfing the web late at night.

Unfortunately I don't have my mother around anymore to let me know how I acted at this age. I will continue my research whenever I can and try to work with him the way I believe will help. Like I said when I'm around he is fine it's mostly just when I am at work.

Your son could be seeing your fiance as competition for your love, is feeling angry and fearing rejection.
Disciplining him without a very good reason to back it up and in a way he can understand could reinforce his feeling of rejection.
I was in a relationship with a divorced mother, and getting the trust and love of the child was a difficult process, but by finding an activity we could all do together and which I could also do with the child on my own really helped.
Children will have a natural disposition genetically, but also through mimicking to behave as their parent, so I don't see walking on tiptoe as necessarily an indicator.

I don't know if I ever necessarily came off as normal as a very young child. I could have had a couple of delays, but they were probably masked, as walking late and not talking much could have been interpreted as "well, she has 2 sisters to communicate for her and carry her around." (which I do have two older sisters who did such). I think I wasn't around a lot of kids at that age, because the kids in our neighborhood at the time, were the same ages of my older sisters and not me. And then, I have a younger sister who is a year younger than me, and she liked to engage me as a companion playmate whether I wanted to or not. There were a lot of arguments that went into meltdown between sharing a room with my younger sister, but that was not picked up on because my older sisters fought far more brutally in their teen years (which was going on at the time I was a preschooler-- one of my older sisters is bipolar and had a really bad temper, and the other liked to instigate it to get a rise out of her). The tension between sharing a room with my younger NT sister was swept under the rug, because unlike our older sisters, we didn't try to choke each other against the back of the front door, we didn't have to label every belonging we had with sharpies to keep from the other sister from stealing it, nor did we fight over an article clothing so much that dad solomon'ed it in half with his bare hands. I think I just kinda got lost in the madness (which is what happens when people have a bunch of kids to where they can't put as much focus on one kid). Because there were things I would do, like I was already having picky eating, sensitivity and sensory issues, and things like that. Routine wasn't much an issue at the time, as my mom was a stay at home mom. There wasn't much variance there. By noon, I would have a cheap pen out and I would be scribbling on paper plates and asking mom how to spell 15 different words. I knew I was bored to tears when David the Gnome was over and mom was going to subject me to "Guiding Light" and "As The World Turns" while I played dolls in the floor. I knew at 2pm I would convince her that I wanted chocolate milk. By the time dad got home, it was time to play outside. But, the minute I started school, it was screamingly obvious that I was abnormal. It's just that my parents didn't pick up on my abnormalities before then and it could be they couldn't pay attention to it with having that many kids, and/or they didn't see me in an environment that made all of my aspie issues strikingly obvious prior to then.