School begins

Well, it wasn't long after school started that we started to get hints dropped about our son. He was young (just turning four) and his language was still sometimes crytpic. One of the ones they latched onto right away was that he was echolalic.

And we had already been through this with the language specialist, who said that our son repeats questions asked to him as a way to buy time, to think and to try to formulate a response. Echolalia, he told us, was not a simple instrumental repeating of words, but a way in words are repeated as a kind of otherwise-pointless practice, for its own sake, or for the pleasure of repeating them alone. And we were told that echolalia was NOT repeating a question whilst you were trying to think of what to say. A friend who worked with autistic adults who had witnessed it many times said that echolalia was very different from what our son did, and we were slightly reassured.

But we had begun to be worried that school was dropping hints that our child was autistic. And his teacher was the SENCO.

Then the headmistress mentioned to me that she thought our son didn't understand his world. I got off the phone and thought: what the hell does that mean? not understanding his world? I sometimes feel like I don't understand my world - what does that mean??

I mentioned it to our wonderful speech therapist, and she made one of those aHA noises, and proceeded to tell me that she had just seen some literature from the National Autistic Society that said that autistic people were different in many ways, but one of the ways in which they were all the same was that they all had difficulty understanding their world. Then she told me that my son's teacher was making comments to her about his "different way of learning" which she told me is code for developmental difficulties.

So apparently people at school were dropping hints about autism, but no one would come right out and say anything.

A similar comment was made again a week later, that my son didn't understand his world. This time I tried to find out what she was trying to convey. There was a fair amount of hemming and hawing. We waited. It didn't seem that the headmistress knew what she meant by it. And finally, she said "Uhhh, you know, socially."

No, I didn't know. That's why I asked. And after she answered I still didn't know.

Finally I asked why everyone was dropping hints about autism, at which point both the teacher and headmistress virtually erupted with feeble protestations such as "we didn't say that". "Yes," we pointed out, "that's exactly the problem."

We noted that our child had been evaluated by two extremely qualified and respected professionals (and Camarata had done the CARS test on our son) who found that he had a language disorder, no social deficits that were not directly related to it and was not actually autistic.

In the end they asked us what could possibly be problematic with them thinking of our child as autistic, even if he wasn't. It might help them to know to work with him, they said.

And so it came rather quickly that our bubble about this seemingly wonderful school was burst. So much for all the individualism. My very bright child with a language disorder was just too messy a problem and needed to be lumped into a category in which he didn't belong. They wanted to say and act as though our son had a life-long developmental disorder, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, for their own convenience.