We first came to realise that our son was autistic, when he was around the age of 15months old. He seemed to act like he couldn’t hear us when we called him, but managed to hear the ads on the TV. He was also not doing a lot of his milestones, which was a concern. He used to do quite a few things earlier on when he was younger, like waving and saying words like mum, dad, bud and bob. He seemed to stop doing all those things over time and didn’t say anything, and didn’t wave anymore. When we took him to our local clinic for his 18 month check up we discussed our concerns and she then sent us for a hearing test and a speech assessment. We also took him to our local Paediatrician for a second opinion, and at that stage because of our son’s age he said that worst case may be that he has about a 5% chance of it being autism. At that stage we didn’t even know what autism was, and didn’t think too much more about it.After waiting for his speech assessment and hearing test we noticed our son doing some odd things like spinning in circled and hitting himself in the head along with banging his hands on his ear and so on. He had also started with the spinning of wheels on toy cars and not knowing how to play with any other toys. We managed to get his hearing and speech assessments done and found out that he didn’t have a hearing problem, but did have a severe speech delay. I mentioned to the speech therapist that the doctor had mentioned about the 5% chance of him having autism and she replied by saying, that just watching him play was very odd.

When we came home after all the assessments we started really watching and noticed he was doing a lot of odd things. We decided to get onto the internet and look up autism. After finding all this information ,we went through and looked at all the signs that point to your child being autistic and managed to tick almost every one which related to our son. We then were convinced that our son had autism. The next step that we took was getting a referral to see a doctor at Westmead. He then confirmed what we had already thought he was going to say and from that moment on we have been really just trying to help our son as much as possible. He was diagnosed as being on the spectrum on the 23rd September 2002 and is due to go for another assessment at the CDU Westmead in Early April 2003.

Our son now attends childcare two days a week and also attends Lifestart once a week. It is continual work for us at home but hopefully it will one day pay off .