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Family health September 2009

Out of control?

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They might just seem like naughty children, but, says Leah Hardy,for many kids with development disabilities, their unruly behaviour may be truly beyond their control.

When Billy, now 15, was two years old, his mother, Liz Jeffrey, started to worry that there was something different about him. "He wasn't really speaking," she explains. "The health visitor said the average child should have about 50 words, but Billy only had three.
I wasn't overly concerned though; after all, Billy had walked at eight months and, in lots of ways, seemed very advanced and clever." But it became clear that the health visitor was worried. "She said, 'Have you heard of autism? I'd like him looked at by a child psychologist.'"

But before Liz got an appointment Billy taught himself to read. Liz says, "So I thought he must be fine, just very clever. He began to speak overnight. One day he couldn't talk, the next he said, 'Pass me the salt, Mummy.' What I didn't realise is that hyperlexia, or extremely early fluent reading, and his sudden talking can be early signs of an autistic spectrum disorder." And sure enough, when Billy was four, he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a type of autism that means children are more able and communicative than those with classic autism and have normal or high intelligence.

Asperger's Syndrome is just one of a growing number of 'invisible disabilities'. These include the milder forms of autism including high-functioning autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its sister condition attention deficit disorder (ADD), the reading disability dyslexia and a host of even more obscure conditions such as pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Children with these conditions look and sound, at least at first, just like regular kids. Yet their conditions cause them to behave in ways that can get them into trouble at school and home, cause them to fall behind, mean they have difficulty making friends and can even lead to depression and unemployment in adulthood.

Andrea Bilbow, founder of the ADHD charity ADDISS and mother of a child with ADHD, says, "There is still misinformation out there that ADHD in particular is caused by bad parenting or lack of discipline or too much TV, which can make life hard for parents and children."

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