Your Memories as a young child

Post Reply New Topic

Hi everyone! I am a parent of a 5 year old boy with moderate autism. He has significant speech delay since he cannot speak in phrases and has trouble pronouncing words. For those of you with ASD with similar challenges as my son, how did you feel, what do you remember, what do you wish your parents would have known?

How and when did you begin speaking in phrases? what worked and what didn't work? thank you

I wish I remembered but I don't. I remember speaking when I was little and not speaking and it didn't feel any different. My mom says I was a frustrated child and she worked with me to speak. I don't remember her working with me. I just remember talking on my own finally. I can remember not knowing how to explain things so I keep silent and not speak so I was unable to defend myself telling my side of the story and just allowed the punishments to happen. I just didn't have the words.

I started talking when I was four and talking correctly when I was six. I have been a big talker since then.

this is where I actually got lucky; my mom's side apparently had good genes in terms of spelling and pronunciation; I was blowing everybody away reading everything and pronouncing everything perfectly as early as 2.

In fact to this day, I can not only pronounce things with amazing accuracy, but I talk so fast, people don't even understand what I'm saying--at least so they say.

Jenvi, I respect you a lot for what you are doing now!
So great to see you help your son!

I sure hope someone in here can give a good answer.

Wish my parents knew about the Gluten/Casein free diet or alternatively DPP IV enzymes (SerenAid).
And the Autism/Mercury connection.

The earlier you intervene with these the better off your child will be at an adult age.

I said almost nothing but 'yes' and 'no' til I was 7. I'm sure I understood what was said perfectly as long as only one person was speaking. A crowded room with lots of conversations would cause me to freeze up. As far as I can remember it was the stress that kept me quiet - I used to talk to myself in whispers a lot. What worked getting me to talk was giving me something to look at and do with my hands and asking a question quietly without looking at me. Then you'd have to WAIT 4 times as long as feels normal for the answer - it takes time to work out what to say. Sometimes you might have to say 'that's a question', because I often missed the fact that a reply was expected. No one worried about me much (I wasn't diagnosed til last year) because I could answer questions in writing perfectly.

My son has PDD-NOS and language and pronunciation problems. He's nearly 7 now and talks in short phrases - often with the pronouns mixed up and verbs in one tense only. He gets stuck on words sometimes and I help his pronunciation by starting at the end of a word. eg for 'psychologist' (we use that a lot) he'd say...'gist, logist, cologist, psycologist'.

What I principally wanted my parents to do was wait to hear what I had to say. I had lots of siblings talking at once in my house so mostly no one remembered that my opinion hadn't been heard. Sometimes my son hides behind the door and we all sit in silence while he says whatever he wants to say (or shout) for 5 mins, and no one's allowed to interrupt or comment. We don't understand much but it's lets him know we're still listening.

I hope that's helpful.

From what my mother tells me, I did have a slight speech delay, but i did know what other people were saying and therefore knew what they were asking for. As far as remembering when i started speaking, I was maybe 3-4 years old (educated guess). Granted, this was back in the 80s and HFA/AS wasnt heard of until 1994-5, however, i think my mother's mother (who was a teacher) suspected something since i showed similar tendencies to an uncle (whom we are sure had it, even though he never got diagnosed). As far as discipline goes, not sure what to recommend . . . with sensory issues, i demonized my father since he was raised with the paddle, but I dont know what he would have done if I was dxed. All I can say is your son is going to see the world through (likely) quantifiable fact as opposed to emotional (meaning that getting mad at him will likely result in him being confused, and yelling could result in meltdown). So, with rules, you have to explain it and why (example, "Dont touch the stove because it may be hot and burn you.").

I know I had trouble talking in a coherent fashion until 7 or 8. I was in special ed classes until 4th grade, then they figured out that I was actually very intelligent and got switched to the gifted classes. I could always understand the words being siad, but if there was not an obvious logic or an explanation, I had difficulties forming a verbal response. Single words were common for me, but with some social interaction and a general easing of expectations (parents stopped trying to force me to be a conversationalist) I turned out very well. I think the most important thing is to make sure that everything you say has an inherent logic behind it, and avoid making general emotional statements. Just my opinion, though.

I didn't speak until I was four and maybe even five. I jus repeated everything I heard for a while and when I learned to speak on my own it came out in a monotone. I supposedly sounded like a robot. I didn't stop speaking like a robot until my late teens and I am somewhat resentful of my parents for not letting me continue to talk that way. Why is a monotone voice so wrong?

I needed to understand WHY I was not allowed to do something. "Because I said so" didn't work and only made me more angry. I was also the type of kid who needed to burn my hand on the stove to understand it was hot.

One of my earliest memories of myself was me fearlessly venturing around the house after everybody went to bed and then my angry ogre of a dad, wearing only underwear, angrily rounding me up.

My Mom said I was almost non verbal at age 6 and everyone was wishing
I would start talking. After i started she says everyone was wishing I shut
up.

Eddie

i remember almost nothing from before the age of 5. One flash of rolling down a sunny bank that I assume was at my grandparent's place.

A VERY few photographs.

Almost NO data from my mother - the one exception being the story of how I and my younger sister walked off and were found some blocks away, sitting in the street corner, I in the act of removing my clothes.

Is the blankout trauma? I have other blank periods that definitely ARE trauma based. Or is it based on development delays? Me no savvy.

I remember through family videos i pronounced;

Yellow = Yewoow
Red = Ret
Green = Grun

I always had fights with my older sister, I threw the cat against the furnace, painted my aunt's stairs with tar, and picked cherries off our garage roof with my sister.

I remember more but I want to do a short entry.