Every parent in this world wants the very best for his child, it’s the natural way things are supposed to be. Unfortunately, sometimes things can’t really be that good and children have to struggle with a few different things that are incredibly challenging to deal with – especially at their age.
One of the things that keeps on affecting our children is Autism and Asperger’s. Children who suffer from these conditions have a lot of trouble with social situations because these conditions really take their toll on them. The paths that they followed are pretty different and as such, we’re helping you out by looking at the differences between Autism and Asperger’s in this article.
Children with Autism usually don’t struggle physically at all, they have no problems getting their first step out and don’t really have a problem when they start running and all that. The first problems for children with Autism come when they start talking – or when they should start talking. It might be hard for the child to say the first word and to start engaging in social communication. As a matter of fact, in some cases, social communication never really arrives.
With Asperger’s disorder, however, things are going to look a little different. The first word of the child is probably going to come early and social communication as well. As a matter of fact, the child might even talk in such a language that the parents will be lead to believe that the child has a gift.
Soon these thoughts of the child having a gift might disappear since as soon as the child enters school things start to look bad. Friendships are going to be a hard thing to acquire and the child might start having obsessive and rigid behavior. Moreover, the child might have interests so intense that they might even take over their life.
Without an incredibly extent set of exams and analysis, it is almost impossible to tell two intelligent individuals apart if one of them suffers from Asperger’s and the other one with Autism. They will actually appear to be dealing with the same struggles and they will have common challenges and interests. It is even possible that the person with Autism and the person with Asperger’s develop a great friendship.
Recently, both Asperger’s and Autism were placed under the same neurodevelopmental disorder that make children struggle with interaction and communication. They used to be two different disorders but now they are known as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), along with childhood disintegrative disorder and pervasive developmental disorder.
The number of children who are diagnosed with the disorder is currently rising and the cause of the rising numbers is yet to be determined. A lot of people believe that this is due to a real increase in the number of cases due to some factor to which the children are exposed, while other believe that the number are rising simply due to better examination being done.
While some children might show symptoms of ASD right in their early infancy, some other children develop the problem later on. These children usually develop normally up until a few months or years and then suddenly become aggressive and lose part of their language skills that had already been acquired.
Some of the main symptoms of ASD include failure to respond to the name, resisting affection and retreating into his or her own world, lacking eye contact and facial expressions, apparently not understanding simple requests and directions, is either disruptive, passive or aggressive when approaching a social interaction. Furthermore, the child might not be able to properly start a conversation with someone else.
As if these weren’t enough, there might be patterns in the behavior of the child that point out to ASD. These patterns include repeating movements such as spinning or hand-flapping seemingly out of context, as well as being disturbed at slight changes in a developed routine. Unusually body language might also be a sign, such as being exaggerated on the type of body language adopted to a specific situation.
As children with ASD grow up they start peeling off these symptoms and become more engaged with other people, they start feeling more comfortable in social situations and then later on manage to live normal or near-normal lives.
If you are worried about your child having ASD it might be a good idea to go ahead and see a doctor, expressing your concerns so that you are able to identify the problem and take care of it as soon as possible. The doctor might give you a few tests to perform on the child to see if there are any delays that might show signs of ASD, these tests include making expressions to the child to see if they respond, and to analyze the behavior of the child.
There is no real known cause to Autism Spectrum Disorder, it is an extremely complex problem make it incredibly hard to really get to the bottom of the issue, but two main factors have been identified that probably contribute to the problem: Genetic problems and environmental factors.
The fact that genes and environmental problems can influence children is still being tested but these are the two main theories. Contrary to popular belief, vaccines do not cause ASD, or at least there is no link between the two of them. Extensive research was done on the subject and no link was identified.