Autism Red Flags - Which is the Most Important One?

Hi, this is Ming, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today we're going to talk about autism red flags. So one of the few most common red flags that I hear a lot the parents would tell me is that, oh, my child isn't responding to their name, isn't looking at us, doesn't have eye contact. Right. Would pull their hands to get something they want. They would do some self stimulation activities such as hand flapping, tiptoeing. Does he have autism? First, a real quick disclaimer. I'm a speech therapists or what we call speech language pathologists in the usa. We are not supposed to give diagnosis for autism, but we can give some advice as to like what you can do if it's suspected that your child has asd. That's autism spectrum disorder. All right, so let's talk about what's the most important one I think is a red flag. The most important thing I see in my clinic is the lack of communication intent. What does that mean? So it's a, it sounds crazy, it sounds like a hard word, but really isn't. It just means that how willing is your child to communicate with you? Okay, we see this. That is a true distinction between just a language delay or language disorder child versus a child who is on the spectrum. A child who is on the spectrum, they have narrow interests, they have ritualistic behaviors. Right. These are some of the red flags, some of the characteristics. But how it translates into how it blocks their development or how well they communicate with each other, like with us, right. Is that they don't have the intention to talk to us. Okay. So there are a lot of times that if they need help, they would rather just try themselves. If they want to, they want to talk to you, they'll just pull your hand without saying the words when actually they have words from like learning from songs, nursery rhymes or abc, whatever, they aren't going to use it in the daily communication. Right. So therefore there's actually a lack of communication intent and that's because they don't understand how to socially communicate and how to use words to get us to do things and communicate their needs, wants and feelings down the road. These things are difficult for them. They don't understand why they're supposed to do it. They don't understand why that we're social, human, like human beings, we're social animals and we need each other in order to grow. They don't understand that. That's a very high level type of description of asd. Right. Whereas you know, when you look at the diagnostic, you know, what was that called? Checklist. A notebook, what we call DSM 5. This is just check boxes or are they able to respond to their name? Are they able to like have eye gaze or whatever? So what happens a lot is that parents are stuck inside of a symptomatic checkbox checklist kind of mentality is that, oh, he does, he has this, he has this. Oh, he doesn't, whatever, right? And then you start to think, does he have autism or not? They'll leave that for the assessor who knows how to use that checklist and see how it affects the child and everyday like communication function. Leave that to them. Think about what you can do. Okay? So if you're suspecting of such and a therapist like myself who's working with your family also suspects of asd, go get a diagnosis, okay? We can never put a label on a child that easily. Okay? Second of all, other than the communication intention thing, one of the most alarming red flags I would see, no matter if it's autistic, you know, adhd, whatever it is, right? If a child has inappropriate play skills, which means that they're not able to play on their own, play with other people, play toys the correct way, they throw things, they don't use the tools in the toy and the set correctly, then I think that's a red flag. No matter if it's autism or not. Usually speaking, it's just a common trait. A common across all ASD children is that their play skills aren't up to speed and therefore they cannot practice their language through playing. That's how everyone learns the language is through playing with different things around the house and talking about it, describing it, thinking and imagining, okay? That's how we build up our knowledge and build up how we do things. Right? All right, so the last point is to talk to all the worrying parents out there about all the symptoms. I hear a lot of. I know what you will say. You say, okay, how about stimming? How about not responding to name? How about all that eye contact stuff, right? If my child doesn't have this, then is it going to increase the chance of autism? Well, there isn't any chance that increases or decreases. Whether your child has it or not is already fixed. You don't know. You really don't know. There's nothing that will soothe or decrease the chance or later on. It's not like a medical condition, right? It's not like if I, how do I reduce chance of getting cancer? You know, like this don't smoke. Right? Don't. Whatever. It's. It's not like that. Autism is like inborn. It happens to a child and it's a, it's a different operating system. I've talked about this before in this channel, right? So if you think about that, knowing these, these red flags are great, but keep it for the professionals to determine, right? That's number one. Number two, is that all that stimming, not responding to, name, eye contact. The underlying reason for all of this is the two that I've been talking about. Number one, they don't have intention to communicate with you, therefore they're not going to look at you. They're not going to respond to their names when you call them. There's no reason for them, they don't understand it. So that's, that's a symptom, right? The underlying reason is because they have autism and they don't know why they need to communicate with you. Right? They don't care. All right? That's as simple as that. All right. Second of all, why they stimming? Because stimming is like. Is what, what is that? Self stimulation is when you are entertaining yourself, okay? Everyone does it, no matter if it's inappropriate or appropriate. It doesn't matter that way. What matters is that when they don't have appropriate play skills, when they have have a different thing to do, then they will start stimming. So if you look at like ASC children or ASC adults for that matter, if they're on the job, they're doing something that they like, they enjoy or whatever, they're playing games, the stimming will be very limited, all right? At least during, when they're doing it, right? After, when they're having like, when they're happy that they've done something, they might go, oh, like that, right? And if you think about it, it's like they aren't occupied, that that's why they're stimulating and they have like sensory needs that are different from ours, right? So if you think about it, at the end of the day, it's because they don't have appropriate play skills or they don't have activities they can do to replace those stimulation, right? So therefore it occurs, it happens more often than it should, all right. If you get why I'm saying, right. So therefore always think about what's the underlying issue. All right? And the red flags for autism, for me at least, are those two, Number one, lack of communication, intention or intent. Right. And number two, do they have appropriate play skills? Do they? Can they play with things correctly in a good way? Imagination, cooperative, you know, sequential, so on, so forth, using the world, knowledge, incorporating into play. So all these two are really big topics. And I think sometimes therapists like myself don't have enough time to tell you about this. But this is a real quick video for you to understand what to look for for red flags. Okay? So if you found this helpful, please help me share it to other people. And that's the end of this video. If you haven't, go to agents of Speech.com checklist for a list of tools and toys that I recommend you to get if you want to start home therapy today. Okay, so that's it. I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.