I know there are quite a few parents here with kids with moderate or even severe form of anxiety. How did this show when they were 2-3 years old? Did things get better or did you end up medicating?
I am starting to see a lot of difference in how DS3 acts at home and outside. He is really starting to come out of his shell at home, starting to communicate more and more every day with ease but ask him to do something new or unexepected, especially outside of his familiar surrounding and that's when he gets in that autistic shut down / not cooperate / cry / freak out mode (for which he has been diagnosed with high functioning autism). He's a very sweet child at home who wants to spend time with me and his dad, tries to engage us in whatever he's doing, even the last week or so started basically provoking me with making faces at me to see if I'll copy him
. Still very reserved, you can just see in his eyes how he's thinking everything through really deep, but he is pretty much 100% here with us with perfect eye contact. He is ok when we go visit friends, you can see he's careful about everything but paying full attention to what is going on and only shuts down when he seems to be threatened.
We just ended with early intervention therapy 4 weeks ago and took a 3 week break before his therapy through school district and private ST started and he was the happiest child ever. He likes the new private speech therapist and is fairly comfortable around her as long as she doesn't push too hard and she doesn't. Yesterday was our second day there and when we walked in, first thing he said was "I can't wait!" ... all happy and smiling
. On Tuesday he had the first school speech and OT session and he just froze there. The second they wanted him to do something he just shut down and started screaming, crying, running away. 30 minutes later they finally let him just run around and explore (something new he's started doing couple weeks back. Until this point he tried to ignore new surroundings but now he's like a little 1.5 year old that wants to see everything and try everything). But the whole stress of this resulted in him not even wanting to go anywhere outside the home. Getting him into his carseat has been a serious fight since then (and he loves car rides otherwise)
now, back to my original question ... I really wonder if a lot of this could be caused by some sort of anxiety? Thinking back, I had real issues with it when I was little and still do to this point but have learned to live with it. I remember it like it was today when I was even still in preschool and remember the feeling of hearing my heartbeat and feeling like my heart will jump out. I was frozen with fear but never told any adults around me or did try but they just didn't understand me. I was clearly identified as gifted (135-145 depending on the tests) but still always feared not being good enough. And I too use a "shut down / ignore" mode to cope ... to this day.
I hate the thought of possibly medicating my little boy but I also don't want him to fight the battles I had to on a daily basis. Did you see anything similar in your kids? How did you work through this? Did you medicate? Did it help?
btw .... he is NOT a sheltered kid. We do not keep him just at home, he gets plenty of outside exposure and in general is just fine with it and enjoys it. It is more of a "performance anxiety" than fear of the surroundings if it makes sense?
We do want to get his IQ tested eventually but first need to work on the communication issues and overall just want to wait till he's older (around 5-6 years old ... he just turned 3) but given the things he has been doing and looking back at myself, I'd think his score would definitely be higher than mine .... 145+ if I was to take a guess.
