Nicki: Tyler was born after an extended labour of three days and was born with a normal delivery but needed to be revived after he was born. As he developed he didn’t really have any health problems. He had a number of cysts on his eyes which are just one of those things we were told. When he got to the age of about a year he was still developing normally, crawling, walking, etc. and then his speech didn’t really come on very well at all. We had some concerns about it, he wasn’t really babbling and the normal baby talk that you get and I spoke to the health visitor and continued to do so.

 

They didn’t think there was anything too much to worry about and the health visitor, as he got older the health visitor arranged some speech therapy. They didn’t think he needed speech therapy because the few words he did say by the time he was about 20 months were very clear. There were only four or five of them. Eye contact wasn’t good and understanding didn’t seem to be particularly good. He had a series of hearing tests which all proved OK. By the time he went to the play school when he was three, on his third birthday we took him into play school and said, “We do have some concerns about Tyler.” He was clean and dry which was the requirement. But they said, “Oh don’t worry, it will be fine.” A week later I went back in and said, “What do you think?” And they said, “Oh we think he is displaying autistic tendencies.” It had been lurking in the background of my mind for a while. Neither of us were aware of any autism in our families were we?

Mark: No.

Nicki: And so he was then fast tracked through the PDDAG [Pervasive Development diagnostic Assessment Group]. Eventually he went through a number of tests with Griffith scores which were low. Initially they diagnosed just learning difficulties and said it probably wasn’t autism. But then he went through as I say a PDDAG assessment and was diagnosed when he was about three and ten months, may be just four. He was very young wasn’t he?