Choice selections from Enrico Gnaulati’s article
“When the signs of autism spectrum disorder are clear, as in Isabel’s [a case mentioned earlier in this article] early detection and intervention are essential to bolster verbal communication and social skills. The brain is simply more malleable when children are young. Isabel’s story in “Unstrange Minds” is a heroic testament to the strides a child can make when afforded the right interventions at the right time.
However, the earlier an evaluation is conducted, the greater the risk of a false diagnosis. Many toddlers can be autistic-like in their behavior when they are stressed. Sometimes the procedures used by experts to evaluate toddlers generate the sort of stress that leads a struggling, but otherwise normally developing, toddler to behavior that is autistic-like.
Nobody has made this point more clearly than the late Dr. Stanley Greenspan, the internationally recognized child psychiatrist who developed the popular Floortime approach to treating autism spectrum disordered kids. In his web-based radio show several years before his death in April 2010, he cited an alarming statistic. Of the two hundred autism assessment programs his team surveyed across the country, many of which were located in prestigious medical centers, only 10 percent emphasized the need to observe a child along with a parent or guardian for more than ten minutes as they spontaneously interacted together. He tended to observe children playing with a parent for forty-five minutes or more, waiting for choice points to engage a child to determine if he or she was capable of more sustained eye contact, elaborate verbalizations, or shared emotional reactions. Dr. Greenspan believed that these conditions of safety and sensitive interaction were essential in order to obtain an accurate reading of a child’s true verbal and social skills.
For a sizable percentage of toddlers who don’t transition well to new surroundings, freeze up with strangers, or temporarily dread being apart from a parent, the formal nature of a structured autism assessment can lead to their becoming mute, hiding under a table, avoiding eye contact, hand flapping, or exhibiting any number of other self-soothing behaviors that get misinterpreted as autistic-like. Trained professionals are supposed to conduct autism assessments in a standardized way. This is clinical jargon for being fairly neutral in one’s approach to the child. This might involve an examiner assuming a seating position that requires a child to turn his or her head ninety degrees to directly look at the examiner when his or her name is called. If the child fails to look up and make direct eye contact with the examiner after his or her name is called aloud several times, the child is considered to be exhibiting autism red-zone behavior. Yet many distressed or slow-to-warm toddlers will only respond to their name if an unfamiliar adult strives to be warm, engaging, and nonthreatening — not just neutral.
It is these autistic-like situational reactions of struggling toddlers during formal testing conditions that make a false diagnosis a real possibility. A 2007 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study found that over 30 percent of children diagnosed as autistic at age two no longer fit the diagnosis at age four. Several years ago, data supplied by parents of over seventy-eight thousand three- to seventeen-year-olds, as part of a National Survey of Children’s Health, discovered that nearly 40 percent had a previous, but not a current, diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
There are other reasons why a sizable percentage of toddlers get erroneously diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Up to one in five two-year-olds are late talkers. They fall below the fifty-word expressive-vocabulary threshold and appear incapable of stringing together two- and three-word phrases. This sort of irregular language development is one of the hallmarks of early autism. Yet it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between toddlers with autism spectrum disorder and those who are afflicted with delayed language development. The situation is further complicated by the fact that toddlers with delayed language development tend to share other features in common with autism spectrum children. Scientific findings at the famed Yale Child Study Center have shown that toddlers with delayed language development are almost identical to their autism spectrum disordered counterparts in their use of eye contact to gauge social interactions, the range of sounds and words they produce, and the emotional give-and-take they are capable of. Consequently, many toddlers who simply don’t meet standard benchmarks for how quickly language should be acquired and social interactions mastered are in the autism red zone.
Expanding autistic phenomena to include picky eating and tantrums only amounts to more confusion when applied to toddlers. The percentage of young children in the United States with poor appetites and picky eating habits is so high that experts writing in the journal Pediatrics in 2007 commented, “It could reasonably be said that eating-behavior problems are a normal feature of toddler life.”
My way or no way: autonomy seeking, not autism
I’d like to engage the reader in a thought-provoking exercise. I’m going to list a collection of behaviors. As you peruse them, ask yourself if these behaviors are indicative of typical willful male toddlers or of possible autism at this age. Remember, the toddler years are from approximately age one to three.
Doesn’t look when you call their name, even if they seem to hear other sounds
Doesn’t look you in the eye much or at all
Doesn’t notice when you enter or leave a room
Seems to be in their own world
Doesn’t look where you do or follow your finger when you point to something
Leads you by the hand to tell you what they want
Can’t do simple things you ask them to do
Has a lot of tantrums
Prefers to play alone
Wants to always hold a certain object, such as a flashlight
Doesn’t play with toys in the usual way
It may surprise the reader to learn that I obtained this list of behaviors from a Consumer Reports health-related article titled “What Are the Symptoms of Autism?” If this exercise left you thinking that these behaviors might be characteristic of both willful male toddlers and autistic children, that’s commendable. This means that you have more than a passing familiarity with early childhood development. It also means that you are keenly aware of how toddler issues can get misconstrued as autistic tendencies.
The glee on the faces of toddlers upon discovering that they can propel themselves away from caregivers and into the world beyond — with the power of their own limbs — says it all. During the first year of life, they were relatively helpless. They were at the complete mercy of caregivers to gauge what they needed. Now their fast-evolving fine-and gross-motor abilities are being put to full use in exploring their surroundings. There is fire in their bellies. They insist on having personal control over what they get to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste and for how long. This is what developmental psychologists call the “need for autonomy” that kicks in during toddlerhood. The word parents tend to use is “willfulness.” There is a world of sensory delight out there for toddlers to discover and sample, and they want nothing to get in their way.
Male toddlers advance at a faster rate than the opposite sex in their gross-motor development and visual-spatial skills. The science is there. Generally speaking, boys are more physically capable of exploring their environments than girls. When they do, objects are likely to be the object of their exploration. Little boys, especially those with strong visual-spatial intelligence, can appear as though they’ve entered a trance when they stare at, squeeze, lick, toss and fetch, arrange, stack, and knock down blocks — only to do it all over again. We forget how immersion in an activity, and repetition of it, can lead to an experience of mastery. Lining up trains in identical order, making the same sounds, and pulling them with the same force can rekindle the same feeling of mastery that was felt the first time this activity went well. Not all repetitiveness and needs for sameness speak to autistic tendencies. When a toddler appears driven to use his body effectively in the accomplishment of a task and to further an experience of mastery, it’s unlikely that he’s on the spectrum no matter how repetitive the task becomes — particularly if that toddler shows self-pride and wants others to share in the excitement of it all, even in quiet and subdued ways.
Boys’ level of engrossment in discovering and manipulating objects can lead them to be oblivious to their surroundings. They may not look up when their name is called. They may appear unconcerned whether you’re in the room or not. Self-absorption while studying objects is expectable behavior for male toddlers, especially for those on the upper end of the bell curve on visual-spatial intelligence.
Parents and educators shouldn’t assume the worst when male toddlers play alone. Research shows that boys are far more likely to engage in solitary play than girls at this age. Many little boys are satisfied playing alone or quietly alongside someone else, lining up toy trains, stacking blocks, or engaging in a range of sensorimotor play activities. It is not until about age four or five that boys are involved in associative play to the same extent as girls. That’s the kind of play where there’s verbal interaction and give-and-take exchanges of toys and ideas.
The difference between a relatively typical male toddler immersed in solitary object play and one who shows early signs of autistic behavior can be subtle. Typically developing male toddlers are more apt to experience periodic separation anxiety. They suddenly wonder where Mommy is. Needing Mommy in these moments takes precedence over the activity in which they were absorbed. Sometimes visually checking in and receiving a reassuring glance back from Mommy is enough. Sometimes more is needed, like approaching her for a hug or a pat on the back. This inspires confidence that Mom will be available if and when needed. The toddler can then go across the room and pick up where he left off playing. This “emotional pit stop” behavior is less apparent with toddlers on the spectrum.
The tantrums of autism spectrum kids are less likely to be of the autonomy-assertion or mastery-seeking variety. Their tantrums more often than not reflect sensory overload. They may scream and writhe around on the floor because they are in physical pain due to their nervous system being bombarded by an intolerable level of stimulation. The sights and sounds at the mall when their family is shopping for holiday gifts may put them over the top. The buzz from and brightness of overhead lights might be a trigger. Rituals and routines are relied on to keep sensory stimulation at manageable levels. Tantrums may signal a need to keep a ritual or routine exactly the way it was to protect the kid from sensory overload.
Sometimes what appears to be an autistic-like tantrum is really what Dr. Stanley Greenspan, the world-renowned child psychiatrist, calls “sensory craving.” This applies to toddlers whose ability to self-regulate their feelings while they’re in the act of exploring their environments is underdeveloped:
Many children show a pattern we call “sensory craving,” where they’re running around the house trying to get more sensation into their system, whether it’s staring at fans, or bumping into things or touching everything or just shifting from one toy to another in a seemingly aimless way, or just spinning around and jumping around or shaking their arms and legs in seemingly disjointed ways. These all look like terrible symptoms and they scare parents and they scare some professionals as well, understandably so. But they’re often signs of sensory craving — a child wants more sensory input, but doesn’t know how to do it in an organized social way.
But certainly not all picky eaters are that way because they are on the spectrum. Autism spectrum children who are picky eaters often have odd food preferences, such as only eating foods that are yellow-colored. Their reactions after repeated exposure to new foods frequently remain acute or become even more blustery. It’s not about power struggles and control. A new food item may literally assault their senses. The smell, look, and texture of that food may induce a type of sensory revulsion and disgust. They can’t be around it. Either it goes or the kid does — perhaps agitatedly running off.
The younger in age a kid is when professionals screen for milder forms of autism, the greater the risk a struggling kid will be misperceived as a disordered one. A vast number of toddlers present in the doctor’s office with a hodgepodge of social and emotional difficulties, such as poor eye contact, overactivity and underactivity, tantrums, picky eating, quirky interests, or social awkwardness. These phenomena need not be seen as telltale signs of autism spectrum disorder. Sometimes they are merely evidence of a perfect storm of off-beat events in social and emotional development mixed with difficult personality traits — with the upshot that the kid, for the time being, is very out of sorts.”