Autism-World

My son is 11 now, and still on an even keel pretty much. We have lost our wonderful teacher of 5 years  and are now on the Teacher Roulette Wheel, going on our 2nd teacher in as many years. He still goes to summer school and still likes certain things, basically there hasn’t really been any large changes during the last month that I can see that would lead up to this. About 2 weeks ago we started noticing he would only walk in the center of the kitchen rug, and if he touched a corner of it he had to go back and retouch it again and again. We observed that for a few days, and then suddenly it took off huge without much warning. Before we knew it, we were seeing him walk by every piece of furniture in the house and having to touch it with his knuckles, wrist, butt, stomach, arm, heel, or whatever other body part he thought was right at that time. Maybe there’s a pattern to it, but I still can’t see it. I had decided at that time to take a backseat wait and see approach, but the final straw came when I saw him lay on the nasty wet ground to touch his ear to it! Then he was touching his ear to the edge of the counter in the kitchen. I thought I might need some professional help with this, because the redirection approach won’t work all the time. Once he was doing a thing with his big toe and a flipflop strap, and when we tried to pull him away, he became uncharacteristically violent. Not seeing that very often, we don’t really want to see it again. But what if this is not something he’s going to drop after awhile? I would hate to be looking back and saying “Gee, we should have done something when it was just starting, because look how bad it is now”. Problem is, I don’t know who to ask. He goes to Speech, I could ask her first. Given that it’s the beginning of the school year, a new teacher, and I don’t know what all else is new, plus I haven’t ever had any luck w/the SD in the past with other things, I really don’t want to involve them at the point. I want to go outside of them and then bring back whatever necessary things I find out and just tell them what to do. It’s been my experience that’s about all that matters. In any case I need a starting out point, what do you think? This isn’t one of those cases where he can go to a psych and talk about it because he doesn’t talk. No one would get much out of him that way, although it would be highly amusing to me to see them try.   He’s not on any meds and I really don’t want him on any, if at all possible. Does anyone else have this problem? Did it get worse or go away?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Parent Resources.