My son is now 15 months old,(he was born a month early had a few complications with his temp and blood sugar. but was good weight and lenght and so on) I have a few questions I want to see if someone can help me with. He does not really speak right now he says dada & every now & then mom, but he babbles up a storm & when he gets excited and really wants your attention he will speak louder babble. He use to say Aj (his name) bubba & now does not really say them. I sometimes hear no or ouch but only every blue moon. Sometimes when people come to our house who he has never meet before or only seen a few times he gets a little shy he will cover his eyes with his arm for maybe5 mins and then after that he will look at them for a little while then be fine with them there. But he is the biggest lover ever he smiles laughs plays & loves dancing. he understands you & looks at you, walks & all the other normal things..He loves cars & will many times carry one around & drive it & will turn his walkers over to spin the wheels. but its not a thing where he cannot go by them with out doing it. I have a short tongue & have a hard time pronouncing words.Now that I have been thinking about it i think he slowed his talking down when he got all his front teeth. I see that he is trying to communicate and does babble like he is trying to tell you something he just no longer really says any of those other words..its always da da.. I know he has a shorter tongue like me cause I was told that when he was a few months old so now I wonder since he got his teeth is he maybe having to relearn how to pronounce those words again since his teeth are there to restrict his tongue from moving properly. Do you guys think it is more of a tongue problem or red flags to autism?

ok calm down. My son is two and you can hardly understand him. His sister says everything for him so he really has no need to talk. Talk to your doctor on his next visit and get him evauluated for speech. Your doctor should be able to help you. My little guy is now in speech. I think its to early to know if it is autism. Each child is different and it could be because he is the baby in the family. Take it easy until you can talk to his doctor.

It may be a tongue problem, it may be hearing problems (especially if he has a lot of ear infections), or it may be just that he is programmed to start talking a little later (especially if his needs are met without needing to speak). Yes, it could be autism, but it doesn't seem like there are other signs, from what you are saying. Many, if not most, boys love to play with cars and wheels, which is why there are so many toys like this available!

Does your son point at things that he wants or that he wants you to see? That is one of the behaviors that is often lacking in autism, but also in a fair number of "normal" 15 month olds.

If you are concerned, speak with your pediatrician. There is a screening test they can use, but I think it isn't usually used until a bit older. You can call the ped's office, rather than waiting until your next regular check-up.

I have a doctors appointment for Tuesday of next week so I am super nervous about that and wish I could speed time up to find out..

Yes he points to things and hold out his hands for his cup when he sees i have it in my hand. he uses his hands pretty normal he eats using his hands and is also learning to color and stuff like that.. I have to say he learns things very very fast I used the white out the one that is like the little film thing that you press down..Not the liquid one. and then set it down beside me and he picked it right up and tried to go over my writing with it. So I dont know I am just worried about his talking and that he lost words.

Hes only had one ear infection but he does not like loud out of nowhere noises. He flipped out when i baby started crying behind him when we were at a restaurant. Or if he does not see the vacuum and it turns on.. he has to see what ever is making the noise or he will cry for ever.. I guess I am just unsure which I do not like being(i have to know things I suck at patience to I will give gifts like three days early cause i just cant wait..lol) so it is throwing me in a whirlwind of scared and sad emotions.

As a mom of a 3 yr old boy who has autism, it really doesn't sound like autism. Does he turn his head when you call him? Does he acknowledge other kids and does he want to play with them? Does he line up his cars/toys and gets really upset when his routine is messed up in any way?

I understand you being worried and I hope and pray you don't have to deal with Autism. Just keep loving him and wait for the doctors' appointment.

Kathy

It sounds to me as if he is too "interactive" with the world for it to be autism, but I am not an expert. One thing your doctor might help you with is finding "Babies Can't Wait". This is some kind of program (I think national) that will come to your home and evaluate and then work with your child if needed. I don't think there is any charge. I have a friend who did it for her son with GREAT results in only a few months (3-4 at the most). I hope that it all works out well.

Is he very active?

My friend's 8 year old son is Austic, so when she had her daughter, now 18 months old, she was concearn about every little thing and tracking all of the 'normal' things kids do at certain ages.

Talking was a big thing, but her doctor, who is also the son's doctor has told her that really active kids sometimes talk later than other. She can say some things, some things we know what the 'sounds' are, and sometime she is carrying on a converation with words that are gibberish.

Discuss your concearns with your doctor, but don't get stressed out until you do.

My nephew when he was younger had speach issues where people that were not around him couldn't understand what he was saying. I could beceause I was around him daily, and this went on until school age where he started speach theorpy.

ladyellam: no he does not line his things up he just has a fascination with wheels. and he carries cars around often not daily thou. Sometime he turns his head and other times he wont like if hes really into something those are the sometimes that it takkes a few times to get him out of what ever he is doing but he could be down the hall and I can say aj come here and he comes to me. He is at home we have not had him anywhere where there are really any kids and if there are kids around us they are my sons age which is 7 so he looks at them and it doesnt really bother him when they go running by.. But we are enrolling him into a moms day out so we can get a better feel on that so he can learn what other kids are. Routines are no where in our life I try so hard to do a routine and night and he he acts the same no matter what .. I was trying to get him a sleeping routine and he can careless about going to be at certain times or anything like that and we always eat a differnt times or out outside nothing is routine here anymore..lol

TexasSugar : I think he is pretty active for a 15 month old he likes going all over the house all the time and likes looking out of windows and going out for runs with me in the stroller he loves dancing to any kind of music even if it sounds kind of like a song he will dance. Hes always playing with toys and doing things or sitting and loving with us..

tchrmom: I will be looking into that if the doctor tells me anything about autism. Or needing to have some speech courses.. thank you for the information.

I am trying not to be stressed about it and I think more and more positive every time I look at him, and after reading things like this or other things online.. thanks everyone for advice..If anymore else has more information I dont mind knowing or reading it..

Austic childern often times have very sensetive hearing as well. When my friend's son watches TV it is turned down very low where we can barely hear it but if you turn it up he covers his ears. She had problems taking him places like the malls because there was so much going on with the noise and sensory overload and most of those trips would end in a melt down, until she invested in earplugs for him. Plus when they go out to eat she has it narrowed down to certain resturants and certain times of the day, usually the less busy.

Of course if you start looking at all the little aspects of things you can always find little pieces parts from this time or another, so don't start picking apart the last 15 months looking for things that could be wrong.

Amanda, I really wouldn't be worrying. He sounds like he's an active, intelligent boy. 15 month old is pretty young to do a diagnosis. They say they can as young as 1 year old, but I personally don't take too much stock in it.

Does he have any food allergies or what they call "a leaky gut"? I know pretty gross but a lot of kids with autism have lots of food allergies such as gluten or casein. My son can eat anything and everything and never has had a problem.

I would ask my pediatrician for a possible hearing test and also have his lead levels checked as well as a gluten test for allergies. It's better and faster to get all the other DX's out of the way. I hope I'm not rambling on. You can also go to ivillage.com and they have message boards about child development issues.

HTH
Kathy

Honestly, I've been in your shoes. It's not fun to be wondering and waiting for an appointment to come up. In my case my son who is now 6 is autistic, but does not show the normal signs of autism. He has aspergers and is considered a genius and tests way off the charts. However, he needs speech therapy and tends to be emotional at times. It's as if someone flicks a switch and you never know what might cause it. As Texassugar posted almost every autistic child has some kind of sensory issue, with my son it's noise.

Just breath and wait for the appointment. If you seriously think there is a problem go see a specialist. They are trained more in this than a regular pediatric doctor. There are more than enough websites on this to look at also. I am a member of Autismspeaks and there are many chapters that you could talk to if need be.

More than likely he is just a late talker, it doesn't sound like he has the signs for autism. However, there are many different forms so it never hurts to go to the doc anyways when there are concerns.

My son didnt really get into talking that much until he was around age 2. And he's still just now starting to form sentences. Something my pediatrician told me to consider, is that when he is making these signs for things with his hands from you, are you asking him to repeat the word for it afterwards, or are you just giving in to him whenever you recognize what it is that he wants? Because if that's the case, then he probably doesn't feel that he has a need to speak for something if he's getting the point across elsewhere. Try getting him to repeat the word for things when he asks for them. Also, it's totally normal for toddlers to go through phases of saying words and then dropping them for a while. I remember those first glorious days of "mama", only to be replaced soon enough by "dada" and it took months for me to hear another "mama" again!! I had also asked my pediatrician if we needed to be worried because it seemed like my older son had been talking a lot more before our youngest's age. All babies are different though!! Dont freak out!!

I'm no expert, but it really doesn't sound like autism to me, and I think he's too young to be diagnosed even if he were.

At most, he *might* have some speech articulation problems, but his overall language development doesn't sound off to me. He's babbling, which is a very good sign. Boys generally are slower at language development than girls, and it's not really that uncommon for some words to disappear temporarily as they learn new ones. I would definitely ask the pediatrician for a referral for a speech assessment. It is not to early for that; IF there is a speech problem, the early the intervention the better.

Ask if there is a state program. Here is KY, we have "First Steps" for children under 3. If you qualify (the delays have to be significant) you get free services, and the therapist comes to your home, which is much better for the kids at this age. They can also evaluated his hearing, and whether he has any significant sensory issues that he might need occupational therapy for. After age 3, the public school system is responsible for providing therapy (again, the delay has to be significant). We even got free preschool thanks to my son's speech problems. A lot of people don't know they can get these services free, and sometimes you really have to push to get the proper referrals, but it's well worth it!

My son had a significant speech delay and articulation problems. He never went thru the normal babbling stage where babies learn how to use their tongue and mouths to make different sounds, and was only saying a few words by age 2, and only we could understand him. He understood everything we said to him, though, and could communicate quite well with gestures, grunting, and facial expression. You could see the wheels spinning in his head, that he KNEW what he wanted to say, just couldn't figure out how to get his mouth to work right to say it. He started speech therapy at 18 months and started doing alot of excercises to help him figure out how to move his tongue and make different sounds. At 2 and 2 months, his language exploded and he went from adding maybe 1 word a month to picking up a dozen or more a week, though he still had difficulty making alot of the sounds properly. He's almost 6 now and never shuts up! He still has trouble with a few sounds and is still in speech therapy at school, but he has improved so much, thanks to the early intervention.

So just a little update I was playing peek a boo with him just a min ago and he said loud and clear there he is twice I am so so so happy.. makes me feel a little more on the positive side.

You're having one of those mommy-itis attacks where we have too much information available to us on the internet and start fitting symptoms to our kids and freaking out. I do it too sometimes. I have to say life was easier when all I had was the "What to Expect the Toddler Years" book and infrequent visits to the pediatrician. I worried a lot less then. Now I periodically freak out deciding one of my kids has something major wrong with her...for example, about once every three months, I end up convinced that my younger daughter has some sort of dwarfism.

Your son sounds just fine. He sounds totally normal for a toddler his age. Sometimes they're a slow talker...but at 15 months most of them don't talk a lot, or it's babbling, but when you listen to it you'll hear them starting to imitate normal speech patterns, almost like they're trying to talk but it's coming out sounds we don't understand. Eventually those sounds will turn into words and you may be the only one who understands them at first.

My oldest daughter was a month early. She's always been a very active kid, strong, big for her age, etc...At 15 months, she could say hi, mama, dada, walmart, and oh s***...and that's all she said. She didn't really get to the point where we could understand every word that she said until she was nearly 5. I asked the doctor if she had a speech problem and he said she might have a behavior problem, but not a speech problem (but I think that's because she didn't know what the flag shape was on the eye chart, so she was calling it a s***box and we could all understand what she was saying). She didn't learn to count until she was 5 and she had to have a little extra help last year at kindergarten.

My younger daughter was born early, but not as early as Valerie, if it matters. She just turned 3 on Saturday and she speaks in very complicated sentences and understands much more than even seems possible. For example, when she tattles on her sister it sounds something like this: "Mom, Valerie actually took my doll away and put it where I couldn't reach it. She broke my heart. I want my doll back now and I want Valerie to be in big trouble." She used to do the thing with spinning the wheels of the toy cars sometimes too...

So they're all different and do things at their own speeds...your son sounds like he's just fine.

he sounds normal to me mama.

i had a daughter first and she could talk fairly early. then we had 2 boys and they both didn't really say much at all and sort of started talking all at once. it seemed like at about 2-2 1/2 just over night they could say just about everything.

i think some kids just have to take it all in for a while and then they'll talk about it later. my youngest will be 3 in january and i can understand 90% of what he says but not everyone can.

it doesn't hurt to ask but i hate for you to get yourself too worked up about it.