Different Autism Types

You might believe your child has one of the autism types. I am going to touch on five different autism types with you.

The first one is Autistic disorder. This refers to children under the age of three having problems with imaginative play, social interaction, and communication.

The second type of autism is aspergers syndrome. Children with aspergers do not have problems with the use of language, rather these children usually score average or above average on intelligence tests. But they share the same limited interests as children diagnosed with autistic disorder and have a lot of social problems. Sometimes these children are diagnosed later such as above kindergarten as well. Also they tend to know an extreme amount of knowledge about a particular interest. For example a child with aspergers might love dinosaurs and be able to tell you every or almost every fact about many different dinosaurs.

The third one I want to discuss with you is Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). This category is for children that have some autistic issues but do not exactly fit any other category. Let me say that there are many characteristics a child with autism might have. If your child for example has 3 or 4 of 10 a doctor might say your child has PDD, but if your child has 5 to 10 of 10 a doctor might say your child is autistic. That is also why it is now an autism spectrum disorder.

Retts' Disorder. This occurs only in girls. Girls begin to develop normally and then between the ages of 1 and 4 they beggin to lose their social skills and communication. Also with this you see instead of purposeful use of their hands, you see repetitive hand movements. I honeslty in thirteen years have not worked with any girl diagnosed with this.

The last autism type I want to talk about is childhood dis integrative disorder. This is where a child develops typically for at least the first two years and then loses some or most of their communication and social skills.

I want to say when I started working with children with autism thirteen years ago, Retts' and childhood dis integrative disorder were not really touched upon. I believe they became more known as more research has been done.

Autism types