Surviving Autism

Personally, I can attest that the symptoms that a child has autism is not present at the early stage of a child. My daughter didn’t show the symptoms until she was two years old. So can you imagine how devastated I was when I learned she has autism.

A U.S. study confirmed this that the symptoms such as lack of shared eye contact, smiling and communicative babbling are not present at six months.

According to the research headed by Sally Ozonoff of the University of California-Davis MIND Institute symptoms emerge gradually and only becomes apparent at the latter part of the first year of life. In my daughter’s case it only became apparent when she was two years old.

They were able to get this conclusion after a five year study of observing each instance of smiling, babbling and eye contact of the children they have on observation until the children reached the age of 3.

The study was published in Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, found that by age 12 months the two groups’ development had diverged significantly.

Intentional social and communicative behavior among children developing normally increased while infants later diagnosed with autism decreased dramatically, the study said.

“This study provides an answer to when the first behavioral signs of autism become evident,” Ozonoff said in a statement. “Contrary to what we used to think, the behavioral signs of autism appear later in the first year of life for most children with autism.”