Parents of older autistic/AuDHD kids — did functional speech, impulse control and safety awareness improve with age?
My son is 6 and has AuDHD, autism level 2. He is verbal, but his functional speech is still quite limited, and this is probably one of my biggest worries.
He can answer very simple questions when they only require a one-word response, especially yes/no questions. But anything that requires him to explain something or retrieve information can be very difficult.
For example, he has a habit of throwing his teddy bear over one of our walls. If we ask him, “Which wall did you throw it over?”, he often can’t answer the question. Instead, he may continue repeating a script that he wants to say. He is also a gestalt language processor, so there is a lot of scripting and repetition in his speech.
At the same time, he is clearly intelligent. He can do mathematics, has an amazing memory and often surprises us with the things he knows and remembers. There seems to be a big gap between what he understands/knows and what he is able to communicate or demonstrate.
His concentration is also extremely poor. He is currently on Amfexa, which has helped to some extent, but he still struggles enormously with tasks such as writing. He often needs someone to hold his hand or physically guide it to keep him on the task.
The other major concern is impulse control, executive functioning and safety awareness.
He will constantly try to run into the road if given the opportunity. He seems to have very little understanding of the actual danger involved. Sometimes he will laugh and say things like, “Cars won’t kill you,” even though we have repeatedly tried to teach him about road safety. Knowing a rule and being able to act on that knowledge in the moment seem to be two completely different things for him.
We are discussing Risperdal/risperidone with his doctor because some of the impulsivity and behaviour is becoming very difficult to manage safely. At the same time, we love his bubbly, happy personality and don't want to lose that side of him. I'm not really looking for a debate about medication ,that is something we will work through with his doctors.
What I would really love to hear about is development over time, particularly from parents of children who were similar at 5–7 and are now older.
Did functional communication eventually improve significantly?
Did your child become better able to answer open ended questions and actually tell you what happened, what they wanted, where something was, etc.?
Did impulse control and safety awareness improve as they got older?
Did executive functioning improve?
Was progress sometimes incredibly slow for years and then become more noticeable later?
He has been doing OT, speech therapy and play therapy for over a year. There has been progress, but it feels very small and very slow, and sometimes it is difficult not to worry about what his future will look like.
I know nobody can predict an individual child's development. I'm really just hoping to hear experiences from parents of older children, teenagers or adults who recognise their younger child in what I've described.
Is there reason to hope that things like functional speech, impulse control and basic safety awareness can improve substantially with age, even when progress at 6 is still very slow?