Posted on 07/15/2008 5:08:57 PM PDT by jazusamo
"New Ways to Diagnose Autism Earlier" read a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. There is no question that you can diagnose anything as early as you want. The real question is whether the diagnosis will turn out to be correct.
My own awareness of how easy it is to make false diagnoses of autism grew out of experiences with a group of parents of late-talking children that I formed back in 1993.
A number of those children were diagnosed as autistic. But the passing years have shown most of the diagnoses to have been false, as most of these children have not only begun talking but have developed socially.
Some parents have even said, "Now I wish he would shut up."
I did absolutely nothing to produce these results. As a layman, I refused to diagnose these children, much less suggest any treatment, even though many parents wanted such advice.
As word of my group spread, various parents would write to ask if they could bring their child to me to seek my impression or advice. I declined every time.
Yet, if I had concocted some half-baked method of diagnosing and treating these children, I could now claim a high rate of success in "curing" autism, based on case studies. Perhaps my success rate would be as high as that claimed by various programs being touted in the media.
If a child is not autistic to begin with, almost anything will "cure" him with the passage of time.
My work brought me into contact with Professor Stephen Camarata of Vanderbilt University, who has specialized in the study of late-talking children— and who is qualified to diagnose autism.
Professor Camarata has organized his own group of parents of late-talking children, which has grown to hundreds, as compared to the several dozen children in my group. Yet the kinds of children and the kinds of families are remarkably similar in the two groups, in ways spelled out in my book "The Einstein Syndrome."
The difference is that Professor Camarata is not a layman but a dedicated professional, with decades of experience— and he too has expressed dismay at the number of false diagnoses of autism that he has encountered.
What Camarata has also encountered is something that I encountered in my smaller group— parents who have been told to allow their child to be diagnosed as autistic, in order to become eligible for government money that is available, and can be used for speech therapy or whatever other treatment the child might need.
How much this may have contributed to the soaring statistics on the number of children diagnosed as autistic is something that nobody knows— and apparently not many people are talking about it.
Another factor in the great increase in the number of children diagnosed as autistic is a growing practice of referring to children as being on "the autistic spectrum."
In other words, a child may not actually be autistic but has a number of characteristics common among autistic children. The problem with this approach is that lots of children who are not autistic have characteristics that are common among autistic children.
For example, a study of high-IQ children by Professor Ellen Winner of Boston College found these children to have "obsessive interests" and "often play alone and enjoy solitude," as well as being children who "seem to march to their own drummer" and have "prodigious memories." Many of the children in my group and in Professor Camarata's group have these characteristics.
Those who diagnose children by running down a checklist of "symptoms" can find many apparently "autistic" children or children on "the autism spectrum."
Parents need to be spared the emotional trauma of false diagnoses and children need to be spared stressful treatments that follow false diagnoses. Yet the "autism spectrum" concept provides lots of wiggle room for those who are making false diagnoses.
Real autism may not get as much money as it needs if much of that money is dissipated on children who are not in fact autistic. But money is money to those who are running research projects— and a gullible media helps them get that money.
Yes, in many cases in education it's the "free" money from the feds and in medicine it's the insurance. The worst thing is they're messing with kids lives in the over diagnosing.
Based on my limited knowledge of this subject, Dr. Sowell is 100% correct. Thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the left has found a new way to prise tax dollars out of all levels of government. Just have your child be declared “autistic” or “asperger” or ADHD or whatever else, and you’re suddenly entitled to piles of other people’s money. Kinda cool, eh?
Your posts are fascinating. Our oldest daughter is what hubby terms “brilliant.” And she is. But she is so different from her peers and always has been. She has always been more mature. She has always been a bookworm and studies what she wants rather than what anyone else wants. She would always do just enough to get by in school in classes that required her to turn in work. If she were lucky enough to be in a class that only required her to read and regurgitate (science classes), then she easily Aced the course. If she were given a bunch of projects to do, she may or may not do the projects depending on her interest. Anywho, we’ve homeschooled her for several years. She hardly ever goes outside and has occasional times when she craves milk. We really have to force her to go outside during the day when she is engrossed in whatever subject has her attention. I will have to read more about this Vitamin D stuff.
I concur with your lament in re what is happening to children; and that what is being done to them is deliberate.
Children want attention and they like discipline. They accept authority when it is for their good.
Yes, this has been my experience with children, too. But what has also been my experience is that children will also accept negative authority, and this is the worry. Teachers teaching that whites are racists; the world's going to end; Christopher Columbus was evil.
I was a girl scout troop leader alongside two other mothers, and we ran a renegade troop; meaning, GSA had gone totally politically correct; and we simply ran our troop on our terms, bypassing the PC stuff. Absolutely marvelous troop. Snowpacking in Yosemite; camping; setting up Gold Mining era recreation "villa" at the Black Diamond mines; sewing, responsible land management, etc. And, all the families of each troop member was actively involved: Dads, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles. So, when we went on an event, say camping, we had to reserve a huge portion of campground. When we organized an event, it was a huge event, took a lot of work organizing, and was wonderful right down to every last detail. It was wonderful. The troop members felt cradled inside the cocoon of a safe community. Which, for the Bay Area, was a wonderful thing for them, for all of us.
You think your balloons were crazy? I won't tell you about our sleepovers, lol!
I concur with your lament in re what is happening to children; and that what is being done to them is deliberate.
Children want attention and they like discipline. They accept authority when it is for their good.
Yes, this has been my experience with children, too. But what has also been my experience is that children will also accept negative authority, and this is the worry. Teachers teaching that whites are racists; the world's going to end; Christopher Columbus was evil.
I was a girl scout troop leader alongside two other mothers, and we ran a renegade troop; meaning, GSA had gone totally politically correct; and we simply ran our troop on our terms, bypassing the PC stuff. Absolutely marvelous troop. Snowpacking in Yosemite; camping; setting up Gold Mining era recreation "villa" at the Black Diamond mines; sewing, responsible land management, etc. And, all the families of each troop member was actively involved: Dads, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles. So, when we went on an event, say camping, we had to reserve a huge portion of campground. When we organized an event, it was a huge event, took a lot of work organizing, and was wonderful right down to every last detail. It was wonderful. The troop members felt cradled inside the cocoon of a safe community. Which, for the Bay Area, was a wonderful thing for them, for all of us.
You think your balloons were crazy? I won't tell you about our sleepovers, lol!
I homeschooled my children. The state (run by Dems) was trying to assert that homeschooling was illegal, and going after parents who homeschooled. It was bad in states run by Democrats, and with a Democrat President. Parents did have their children taken away from them and put in foster care. Mine, was a fight with the state every single year. I was lucky.
By contrast then, wouldn't it also make sense that people with lighter skins living close to the equator have other such problems? Like too much Vitamin D?
In re the first battle re my son; although I kept him mostly free from the nanny-state, in order to work around the state coming after me, I did have to concede to having him at a very "special" school for special needs children. He was 3/3-1/2. After two months of being there, his special ed teacher, a truly gifted woman, pulled me aside and asked me why my son was there; she saw nothing wrong with him. Rather than involve her in my saga; I just shrugged.
My point is this, the taxpayers were footing the bill for this school and program. Democrats have been trying to not only force private companies to fund "day care"; but to force children into schools at younger and younger ages. I saw first-hand, that this was one way of accomplishing their goals - creating a "need" for getting kids into "programs" earlier and earlier.
I never took or looked for a single penny from the state; I was trying to avoid their clutches, rather than attempt in any way to "benefit" from their taxpayer Largesse schemes.
Then the school "closed", and all the students were assigned to a regular pub ed school, with classrooms and special ed teachers. And that's where the second adventure I relayed comes in. My son was there for just over a month. After I pulled him, the district head of "special education" called me, raking me over the cools, and telling me that if I pulled him out now, she'd see that he never got special ed status again! I said "Fine!" and hung up the phone. My son did not enter a classroom again, until he was 11 and qualified to enter a college classroom. (And yes, of course, I'd had to fight for that, too.)
And all during those years was that smarmy cocooning swampmucking dictum about homeschooling kids not being "socialized".
Liberals only want children socialized on their own terms: Dictating who the children shall socialize with, and how.
And I see a Democrat congress, and a potential Democrat President, and I see Dejavu.
Stories such as yours make me very grateful that we’ve managed to stay “under the radar” since our boys were born! It probably helped that we moved a lot. 4 out of 5 could be “diagnosed” as ADD or Autism Spectrum, based on the checklists that the public school use.
Tax-chick, on our move out, and we hit Oklahoma and saw our first Pro-Jesus billboard, we went into shock. "That's allowed here?" was our complete reaction.
And thus you see here, the difference between the SF Bay Area, and elsewhere around the U.S.
Once out of CA, one can see so much clearer how bad things have gotten in the Bay Area. How punched down people are in the Bay Area.
When you live there, you move through the hoops as best you can. But once away from it, you get to see the awful enormity of what is and has been taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I don’t get the purpose of the picture in your post
This guy knows what he’s talking about. I heard him discussing this on a radio talk show before our second son was born. When our son was three and still not talking, I remembered what Dr. Sowell had said about late talking children being mistakenly diagnosed as autistic. I had seen real autism when I was in nursing school and never forgot it. I knew my son who loved to cuddle and hug was NOT autistic.
We avoided the public schools and had him tested by a private audiologist, and went to private speech therapy. This did not totally avoid the people who see autism in every kid, though. One young lady who was fresh out of school with a master’s degree and absolutely no experience with three year olds told me she saw “autistic tendencies” in our son because he screamed when she took away his toy(his only available form of expression, not having any language skills at that time) and he liked to line up cars in a row, like they are on a road.
To make a long story short, we ended up seeing Dr. Camarata for evalutations three years in a row. He told us our son was definitely NOT autistic and had a language delay. He and his wife showed us how to handle it and told us what to do. One of those things was to home school our son because kids with his type of language problem did very well at home.
I wish I could meet Dr. Sowell and thank him in person for saving us from a nightmare.
You make it sound like you arrived here from another planet!
Your whole experience sounds amazing. I’m so glad you’re in a different place now where it’s easier.
Thanks for posting your story, it helps me be thankful that I live in Michigan where at least it’s easy to home school.
I meant to put this in my first post, sorry to ping you twice.
That’s De Nile.
It’s interesting how the public schools serve low fat milk rather then Whole Milk with Vitamin D. Are they contributing to the problem? If so, then this is nothing new. It seems the public schools are in the business of causing problems that they get to cure.
Does anyone on this thread have any expertise/experience with a “Non-Verbal Learning Disorder” (NLD)? My youngest (11) has been diagnosed with this and I am gathering info and getting my bearings on how to deal with it, so to speak, and would appreciate some other perspectives.
day10
A tired and worn-out joke is that 'De Nile ain't just a river in Egypt'.
It appears to be a slap at Sowell.
Yawn.
Oh okay, thanks for clarifying
A friend of mine and my brother both were worried because the doctors were concerned that their one year old sons did not talk yet. I told them that was crazy. You shouldn’t expect a one year old to talk. Nevertheless they did what the doctors said and sent their sons off to speech therapy.
My own son didn’t talk until he was 4. Oh, not for lack of trying. He had an older sister and brother who never let him get a word in edgewise. Whenever he’d open his mouth to talk, he’d have to shut it because one or the other of them said something first. It taught him to be a good listener.
By the time he started kindergarten he was still speaking like “me wan dat” and couldn’t pronounce the “S” sound and another consonant. So they took him out of class every day for speech therapy. It really helped. He’s 21 now and he doesn’t shut up, which is fine with me. But he’s still a very good listener.
Nobody ever told me maybe he is autistic back then. I wouldn’t have believed it anyway. It’s disgraceful that doctors scare these parents into thinking that a one year old or two year old or even three year old who doesn’t speak is autistic. Some kids just talk when they’re ready and others try to talk but can’t get a word in. And then there are those who are genuinely autistic and for them and their family it’s tragic.
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