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(Gosh I thought the last one of these was about two weeks ago, not five! Guess I've been busy and tired.)
In comparison to Sophie, so far Andrew has always been our "easy" kid. Sure he gets rigid about things sometimes, and okay his talking is coming along even more slowly than hers did, but the hours-long tantrums and constant feeling of having to walk a tightrope to keep the kid from exploding are just not things we have to deal with. He's usually cheerful, he's getting there with the toilet training (albeit with more trouble & effort than his sister took), he demands a lot of attention from Mummy but what toddler doesn't? He's been attending a nursery (here "Kindergarten", since kindergarten is "Vorschule" which is usually just the final year of nursery but with a state curriculum to pay attention to) since he turned one, and while we haven't always been thrilled with their organisational abilities or communication styles, he has been happy there. In October or so they moved him suddenly from the toddler group (ages 1-3) to the family group (ages 2.5-6) because they were lacking the numbers to keep his group open, but as far as we knew this was going fine. (Of course, due to pandemic restrictions, we weren't ever allowed into the building so couldn't see much for ourselves.)
So imagine our alarm when a letter was thrust into Mike's hand in March or so, telling us that given our child's suspected developmental issues and possible hearing issues, we need to take these concerns to the pediatrician and report back their findings. What the f**k? we ask ourselves. What developmental issues – the speech thing? – and what hearing problems??
While it turns out that someone jumped the gun on giving us this letter – it was supposed to be handed to us during the course of a parent-teacher talk – the details turned out to be even more alarming and cognitively dissonant. The official documentation we were given took a very hard line on Andrew's apparent problems – that he doesn't speak or seem to hear the teacher, that he doesn't answer to his own name, that he is completely uninterested in group activities, that he doesn't make eye contact, that he makes strange out-of-context noises, and a bunch of other things that point straight to autism. Meanwhile the conversation with the teacher was about how much better he was doing since Christmas, how he has these difficulties with language but is happy and has been participating more since then too.
And yet, it is always the things written down that are taken seriously. I had been starting to worry about his language, to be honest; while he does talk quite a bit, it tends not to be very intelligible and really his language should be a lot more complex by now. Since he is in a bilingual environment, it became one of those things where nobody was worried until suddenly everyone was worried. But the rest of it smelled like tendentiously misinterpreted bullshit – was he uninterested in group activities because he's autistic or because he is still too young to understand what is going on? Are they saying he doesn't speak because he's hard to understand? Are his "strange out-of-context noises" perfectly intelligible if you recognise that he is playing his favourite game "tram doors closing"?
So we took him to the pediatrician, who referred him to a child neurology specialist, who was quite frankly unfriendly, didn't bother to understand me properly (in German) and mis-recorded facts, and essentially set the stage for "this child is obviously autistic." We were referred on from there to child psychologists, who did a full evaluation of him over a couple of weeks in late May and June. This is a pair of colleagues who were rather more sympathetic, but continue to be fairly determined to see autism there. I suppose anyone who has been through this lately with their own kids will be aware that, as I am learning, autism is such a squishy diagnosis that pretty much anything can be interpreted that way.
"He doesn't talk." "Yes he does." "He doesn't point out things in his environment." "Yes he does." "But he does it very repetitively."
"He doesn't make eye contact." "He makes eye contact with me all the time." "Well he should be making more eye contact with others."
The saving grace, for the time being, is that due to the need to avoid a bunch of inflexibly bureaucratic traps for the unwary (which I won't go into here) he does not, so far, have a diagnosis. In the end the unofficial psychiatric verdict was "It could be autism or it could just be a delay, we'll have to see."
Meanwhile the nursery decided that he was too problematic and disruptive for the family group, and have put him back into another toddler group, and he started having naps again and it's amazing how much that improved his behaviour. Of course we also found out that some of the nursery staff really believed that he doesn't talk at all (mostly by one member of staff being shocked when he spoke to me one day at pickup) so who even knows. We will move him to the public kindergarten in September – this was planned long before the drama started, but now I am even more glad to get away from the nursery – and we'll see what they make of him there.
Mostly I am just unbelievably fed up with the way the Austrian child rearing authorities want so badly to pathologise both my children, and remain firmly convinced that, were we in the US or the UK, he would have had speech therapy a year ago and no one would be even thinking about autism. But here, conformity is key, every divergence is a developmental problem, and still I can't get a referral for a goddamn speech pathologist.
In comparison to Sophie, so far Andrew has always been our "easy" kid. Sure he gets rigid about things sometimes, and okay his talking is coming along even more slowly than hers did, but the hours-long tantrums and constant feeling of having to walk a tightrope to keep the kid from exploding are just not things we have to deal with. He's usually cheerful, he's getting there with the toilet training (albeit with more trouble & effort than his sister took), he demands a lot of attention from Mummy but what toddler doesn't? He's been attending a nursery (here "Kindergarten", since kindergarten is "Vorschule" which is usually just the final year of nursery but with a state curriculum to pay attention to) since he turned one, and while we haven't always been thrilled with their organisational abilities or communication styles, he has been happy there. In October or so they moved him suddenly from the toddler group (ages 1-3) to the family group (ages 2.5-6) because they were lacking the numbers to keep his group open, but as far as we knew this was going fine. (Of course, due to pandemic restrictions, we weren't ever allowed into the building so couldn't see much for ourselves.)
So imagine our alarm when a letter was thrust into Mike's hand in March or so, telling us that given our child's suspected developmental issues and possible hearing issues, we need to take these concerns to the pediatrician and report back their findings. What the f**k? we ask ourselves. What developmental issues – the speech thing? – and what hearing problems??
While it turns out that someone jumped the gun on giving us this letter – it was supposed to be handed to us during the course of a parent-teacher talk – the details turned out to be even more alarming and cognitively dissonant. The official documentation we were given took a very hard line on Andrew's apparent problems – that he doesn't speak or seem to hear the teacher, that he doesn't answer to his own name, that he is completely uninterested in group activities, that he doesn't make eye contact, that he makes strange out-of-context noises, and a bunch of other things that point straight to autism. Meanwhile the conversation with the teacher was about how much better he was doing since Christmas, how he has these difficulties with language but is happy and has been participating more since then too.
And yet, it is always the things written down that are taken seriously. I had been starting to worry about his language, to be honest; while he does talk quite a bit, it tends not to be very intelligible and really his language should be a lot more complex by now. Since he is in a bilingual environment, it became one of those things where nobody was worried until suddenly everyone was worried. But the rest of it smelled like tendentiously misinterpreted bullshit – was he uninterested in group activities because he's autistic or because he is still too young to understand what is going on? Are they saying he doesn't speak because he's hard to understand? Are his "strange out-of-context noises" perfectly intelligible if you recognise that he is playing his favourite game "tram doors closing"?
So we took him to the pediatrician, who referred him to a child neurology specialist, who was quite frankly unfriendly, didn't bother to understand me properly (in German) and mis-recorded facts, and essentially set the stage for "this child is obviously autistic." We were referred on from there to child psychologists, who did a full evaluation of him over a couple of weeks in late May and June. This is a pair of colleagues who were rather more sympathetic, but continue to be fairly determined to see autism there. I suppose anyone who has been through this lately with their own kids will be aware that, as I am learning, autism is such a squishy diagnosis that pretty much anything can be interpreted that way.
"He doesn't talk." "Yes he does." "He doesn't point out things in his environment." "Yes he does." "But he does it very repetitively."
"He doesn't make eye contact." "He makes eye contact with me all the time." "Well he should be making more eye contact with others."
The saving grace, for the time being, is that due to the need to avoid a bunch of inflexibly bureaucratic traps for the unwary (which I won't go into here) he does not, so far, have a diagnosis. In the end the unofficial psychiatric verdict was "It could be autism or it could just be a delay, we'll have to see."
Meanwhile the nursery decided that he was too problematic and disruptive for the family group, and have put him back into another toddler group, and he started having naps again and it's amazing how much that improved his behaviour. Of course we also found out that some of the nursery staff really believed that he doesn't talk at all (mostly by one member of staff being shocked when he spoke to me one day at pickup) so who even knows. We will move him to the public kindergarten in September – this was planned long before the drama started, but now I am even more glad to get away from the nursery – and we'll see what they make of him there.
Mostly I am just unbelievably fed up with the way the Austrian child rearing authorities want so badly to pathologise both my children, and remain firmly convinced that, were we in the US or the UK, he would have had speech therapy a year ago and no one would be even thinking about autism. But here, conformity is key, every divergence is a developmental problem, and still I can't get a referral for a goddamn speech pathologist.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-03 01:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-04 06:54 pm (UTC)