Nemours Children's Health, Jacksonville

The goal of speech therapy is to help your child communicate effectively with other people across all environments. This may take the form of using gestures, simple signs, verbal speech, and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).

Some other common things speech therapists can help with:

• Nonverbal skills, such as signs or gestures
• Forming speech in a clearer way
• Communicating thoughts and feelings clearly
• Understanding and responding to questions
• Discerning facial expressions and their corresponding emotions
• Noticing and understanding body language
• Feeding and swallowing
• Stuttering

Yes, a psychiatrist is a good person to speak with regarding medication for your child. While you might have an idea of what might work for your child, it’s best to have a conversation with a medical professional, such as a psychiatrist. What works for one autistic child may not work for another, so consider your child’s individual needs and goals. 

If you’d like to explore prescription medications or supplements for your child, weigh your options and concerns with your child’s medical team and create a plan. Discuss developments and side effects with your child’s doctor and adjust as needed.

When you visit a neurologist, they’ll assess your child’s needs, run some tests (think imaging or EEG), and diagnose. From there, they’ll create a customized treatment plan. Medication, lifestyle tweaks, or maybe even a referral to another specialist could be on the table.

There unfortunately isn’t one test for all neurodevelopmental conditions. Most likely you will go into a visit to test one or two medical conditions. If you are looking for a comprehensive autism evaluation, developmental pediatricians, psychologists, or neuropsychologists are the preferred specialists who can diagnose autism.

No, neurologists focus mainly on non-surgical interventions. If your child needs surgery, neurologists might point you in the direction of a pediatric neurosurgeon.

A mental health professional (such as a pediatric psychologist) can help concerns around anxiety, depression, trauma, eating disorders, ADHD, behavioral challenges, OCD, grief/loss.

Yes, picky and selective eating is actually a quite common concern for children with autism. If you rolled your eyes looking at the steps above because your child with autism has never had a full day's serving of vegetables in their life, you are definitely not alone. As if getting kids to eat their veggies isn’t challenging enough, research shows children with autism have significantly more eating challenges than their peers who are not autistic.

In addition to sensory difficulties that can lead to a lot of anxiety with food, autistic children are 4x more likely to have gastrointestinal issues such as stomach pain and discomfort. This creates the perfect storm for extra extra picky eaters - and a lot of added obstacles and concerns for parents. 

The difficulties associated with autistic children and food can cause a wide range of concerns from children being underweight to overweight (overweight children can still be at risk for nutritional deficiencies!).  This can lead to slower than normal growth and nutritional deficiencies like low vitamin D and calcium levels. Even when given multivitamins, many children with autism are still found to have some of these nutritional deficiencies.

Here are some tips:

1. Keep to a schedule - setting schedules for meal and snack  time can help picky eaters build up their appetite throughout the day
2. Minimize distractions - removing distractions like screens and toys can help your child be more engaged at mealtime 
3. Approach new foods together - Make new foods less scary by trying them together. Touching and smelling the food together before tasting it 
4. Support choice & control - Allowing your child to pick which foods they eat will help them feel more in control 

For more tips, check out our guide for getting a complete diet.

It may not seem obvious, but eating is a complex behavior that involves perceptual, emotional, and cognitive processes. And we know that children with autism process things differently. While many of us look forward to things like our afternoon snack, it may be an activity that causes a lot of anxiety for your child.

Parents describe food selectivity being determined by a few of the following factors: texture (69%), appearance (58%), taste (45%), smell (36%), and temperature (22%). Uniform texture, bland and neutral color foods are reported to be overwhelmingly preferred by more than 90% of children with ASD.