On diet for 1 week -echolalia & perseveration on toys has increased -withdrawl?
Ok… things seem to be going pretty well. Zach has been gf-cf for aweek and has eaten most things we have introduced — woohoo! Hisverbalization has increased, but it seems to be all delayedecholalia. The last couple of days he has been perseverating on acouple of his toys… his leapfrog basketball hoop that counts,alphabet and spells 3 letter words. Now, all day long, out of theblue will say “d-o-g dog ruff ruff”. Normally, if he perseverates,it is on a spinning object like looking at wheels of a car etc. Iguess he went from visual to sound stimming. Is this consideredwithdrawl? We stopped most casein weeks ago and last week cut out allremaing gluten and casein products.
This post tagged as: gluten ms, casein, stimming
Santina Winkelbauer said,
Wrote on January 17, 2007 @ 1:01 am
I can’t comment on whether what your son is doing is withdrawal, but wouldn’t besurprised if it is. What I do want to comment about is that either delayed orimmediate echolalia may be functional communication for some children in somecircumstances. See
http://www.bbbautism.com/pdf/article_59_echolalia_and_autism.pdf, especiallyregarding Dr. Barry Prizant’s work in this area.
Especially if your son had not been responding verbally at all prior to thediet, if he is trying to communicate, even with echolalic utterances, thissounds to me like a very good sign. As the fog clears (if he has been “drugged”by the peptides), I would expect him to be able to communicate more, boththrough echolalia and, eventually, spontaneous speech. Realize that it is quitelikely that his initial spontaneous utterances will be much shorter and lesscomplex than his echolalic ones, as he will be generating these from his as-yetlimited knowledge or understanding of semantic/grammatical rules, whereas theecholalic utterances come “ready-made.” Try to remember to reward these simplerutterances at least as much as you do the longer ones, but also remember that,for however long he needs them, the echolalic utterances may well havecommunicative value for your son and those he interacts with, so don’tdiscourage them if that’s the only way he can communicate something. Just like teaching a child with certain communication issues to sign reducesfrustration about knowing what they want to say but not being able to get it outand may be a stepping stone to spoken language for many of them, hopefully onceyour child sees that he can communicate verbally, even with echolalicutterances, this will facilitate more spontaneous utterances.
Hope this helps.
Melisa Schumpert said,
Wrote on January 17, 2007 @ 1:48 pm
It might be, but echoing, for my son, was caused by deficiencies in Bvitamins and vitamin C, and systemic virus issues. Removing glutenwill have removed most, if not all, of his source of B vitamins, sotry giving a low dose of a B vitamin supplement and see if that helps.