The Developmental Milestones of Autism

As we keep saying in our blogs, it's awesome to see psychology at work in our daily lives. As you might have guessed, developmental psychology hits particularly close to home because of my brother's autism. When we learned about developmental psychology, we said that there are certain milestones that a person must reach before they can move on to the next stage. This applies to both physical and cognitive development. Physical maturation happens in stages: a child cannot sit up before they can hold their head up on their own.  In cognitive development, Piaget's stages mandate that there are four main stages of cognitive development that must happen successively. If a child fails to reach a certain cognitive milestone. That's where autism comes in.

In class, we mentioned that some developmental delays are fine, but delays past a certain point can pose a serious problem to development. We mentioned that speech usually begins at around ten months of age with one-word exclamations and progresses from there. Piaget's sensorimotor period is the time when a massive amount of development occurs and this is the time when you find out whether there's a developmental delay or not. In many cases, developmental delays are indicators of autism. My brother, who started sitting up at eight months and walking at ten months, didn't say a single word until age 3 and a half. These delays are common indicators of autism.

Let's go through some of the specifics: there are four main developmental indicators of autism. The first indicator is social delay. When neurologically normal children are learning how to interact with others, autistic children are avoiding eye contact and tend to be more irritable than other children. Autistic children also exhibit extreme language delays, just like the delays I described in my brother. There is also the issue of emotional development: autistic children exhibit detached behavior towards parents and caregivers while other children are learning how to fit in with others. Finally, autistic children exhibit odd behaviors, or "stimming." These behaviors include extreme fixation on certain objects and tuning out the rest of the world.

These are just some typical symptoms of autism. As always, it's interesting to see how psychology plays into normal life, especially when it hits so close to home. In fact, it hits close to home for millions of people because current statistics say that 1 in 4 boys is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.

Wikipedia has information. Enjoy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism