Of all the basic information a parent needs most is to hear this: Your child is capable of loving you. If they do not show affection the way other children do, it is not personal. Parents will learn over time to recognize how their child expresses their connection to the parent.
Atypical sensory experiences are estimated to occur in as many as 90% of autistic individuals. They impact every sensory modality including taste, touch, hearing, smell, vision, proprioception, and balance.
Proprioception, or kinesthesia, is the sense that lets us perceive the location, movement, and action of parts of the body. It encompasses a complex of sensations, including perception of joint position and movement, muscle force, and effort.
Some children with autism cannot distinguish between foreground and background information. Pain and distress may just blend into a chaotic mix of sensations. Other autistic children may experience fragmented perception – the inability to take in multiple pieces of information at once. Instead, they experience the world in bits that do not fit together into recognizable patterns.
Other children may have what is called sensory agnosia. These individuals fail to recognize incoming sensory data, yet their primary sensory functions are intact, and they have no general mental impairment.
In some children, the ability to accurately recognize, process and report incoming sensory stimuli can vary dramatically from day to day. Imagine a child that has a urinary tract infection. Over the course of a week, she may one day not feel any sensation, while another day, mild duress and yet another wailing in pain. This can make it nearly impossible to get accurate medical care for conditions unrelated to autism.
Children may also experience sensory synesthesia, which is a cross channeling of incoming data. This is when sensory input – such as a sound – gets process as or alongside another sense such as color. The child may for example, see the color red whenever they hear a certain musical tone. #autism
35-Year Public Affairs & IT Professional 