Quote:
Originally Posted by CardiacCoug
That's good advice. These things like autism, Asperger's and PDD are way overdiagnosed in very young children, usually by alarmist teachers or therapists who don't recognize that there is a wide range of development that is within the normal range.
I didn't talk much until I was four years old and my parents put me through a lot of speech therapy for years after that. Our oldest son was not speech-delayed but some idiot teachers at his pre-school told us he might have autism or ADD when he was 2 and 3 years old because he wouldn't make eye contact or sit in his chair. They put him through all of this formal testing and labeled him as being "on the autistic spectrum" which really upset my wife -- she was worried he would never live a normal life, etc. I thought all along that he was totally normal and he has turned out to be a totally normal, smart kid.
I think it's OK to go ahead with some type of evaluation for your son, just keeping things in perspective, like it sounds like you have been. Most likely he is just fine. Doing some formal hearing testing is probably all I would do.
I'm sure some will disagree with me, but I don't believe that even if a kid has autism, Asperger's, PDD, etc. that "early intervention" with therapy makes any long-term difference. Therapists like to claim that diagnosing a kid early is important to justify their existence, but I don't buy it. Now if a kid needs hearing aids, that is a different story and you want to do that as soon as possible.
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I completely disagree with your lack of urgency. Our son had a host of issues that were either missed or misdiagnosed by two pediatricians and one eye doctor. One of his issues was that his eyes weren't lining up correctly. It was a bit subtle, but it was definitely there. We asked the pediatricians AND our our eye doctor about it and all said not to worry about it. When we finally got him in to specialist dealing with developmental delays, he told us to get our son to a pediatric ophthalmologist immediately. He ended up having two eye surgeries. The pediatric ophthalmologist told us that if we had waited another six months to a year, he most likely would have suffered permanent loss of sight in one eye. Which is exactly what happened to two of our neighbors.
The point is, kids with developmental delays often have a package of issues. There is no reason to delay a diagnosis.