Tony Attwood's son diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome

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Professor Tony Attwood is a clinical psychologist widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on the developmental disability and yet it took him 35 years to realise his son Will had the syndrome.

And he isn’t the only one, Elaine Nicholson, CEO of UK charity Action for Asperger’s, didn’t discern her child had the syndrome until his school picked up on his “quirkiness” and sent them to a psychiatrist.

“Despite recognising Asperger’s syndrome in one of my stepchildren, I did not see it in my own son, born seven years after my stepchild,” Nicholson told HuffPost UK.

My stepchild had quite significant speech and language issues that affected the production of his speech creating ‘babble’ and which affected him until he was 7+, but my own son did not suffer the same,” she explained.

“He was creating sentences such as ‘how extraordinary is that new toy!’ at age 20 months.

“Both did suffer speech and language issues but of varying degrees of difficulty.

“Because our youngest son was not exactly like our older son, we thought that the little differences that made him, were not Asperger’s syndrome.”

Nicholson continued: “It was not until we took our second son to a psychiatrist to check out those differences - because by then his school had picked up on his quirkiness - that, upon interviewing him, and asking him ‘if I said to you pull your socks up...what would that mean?’ and our son gestured to pull his socks up... amongst other questions asked, that my husband and I, with mouths dropped open, realised that we were in fact looking at Asperger’s syndrome once more.

“My husband is a GP, I was a counsellor working with children, our child’s grandmother worked as a teaching assistant in a special needs school, and with one child already previously diagnosed, none of us could see the Asperger’s syndrome condition in our second child.”