They
always, first and foremost, intervene and see if a child’s behaviour changes when their parents have been given some help and guidance and the kids have been given some emotion management support or in-school counselling or something of a sort.
For obvious reasons, ASD assessment is the last thing you do, not the first.
When you eventually do an autism assessment referral, part of the form generally asks what services you have already been signposted to. They want to see that every other avenue
has been perused
first. This is where you get to say: “Mum has willingly attended
x amount of parenting courses, a social worker investigated the family and is happy with what they see, the kid has had
x types of intervention at school, there is a family support worker working with the kid at school and family at home at present, and still the behaviours persist”.
The autism assessment triage team basically want to be satisfied from that form that there is no great adversity that could be the root cause of the child’s behaviour
instead of autism. They need to do their due diligence before they chuck a huge label on a kid, and before you’re referred across to what is a very expensive, specialised and scarce resource on a whim. They want you to jump through every alternative hoop first to
prove the kid’s behaviours can’t be more easily explained away by poor parenting, trauma, attachment disorder, hormones, etc. and they want to see evidence of how long potential “symptoms” have occurred.
The longer you engage with professionals, the more evidence you have. If you (like Sarah) have a child you think has masked well all their life and only started to show their autism in secondary school and they have always attended a mainstream school with no concerns all throughout primary, then you have to understand, you have
duck all evidence for a referral so you’re going to need to work bloody hard to build a strong case - and that means working with as many professionals as possible whether you believe it to be “right for your family” or not. Some drippy, freshly-qualified family support worker half my age, with no children of her own, giving me tips I’d already tried was just
but I still had her in my home weekly and made her a cup of tea and let her tick her boxes; she walked away with job experience and it became another stepping stone towards autism diagnosis for us.
It feels crap to essentially be made to feel like you might actually just be a rubbish parent so that they can rule out every other possible explanation (I would argue with good reason though) but you have to suck it up and ride it out. It’s the process. It’s a
long process, so the earlier you get on board with just engaging with what the professionals suggest the quicker and easier it ultimately is. Spoken from experience.
This isn’t new. This isn’t only her. This is the way it’s done. Her “pre-qualified Ed-psych friend” has
surely clued her up on this?
P.S. I could be losing
three pints of blood, but I’d just stuff myself with tampons and get some of those maternity pads you wear post-birth that feel like a mattress between your legs, dose up on
pain, take a puppy toilet training pad to sit on, wear dark trousers, and book a taxi door-to-door (she knows how to do that bit). Nobody and nothing would come between me and accessing what my children need.
Could she not have let the school know she wasn't attending due to losing a pint of blood? 
) is incredibly crass. She does not behave like a cultured woman at all. This is not what Pamela would have wanted, iykyk.
