Sarah Spence: Autism is a nerve developmental disorder that is probably in many different things but a it's characterized by at least three things in every child, those are first a deficit in communication skills, that doesn't necessarily mean that the children don't talk but they don't use their language in a communicative way.
Kimberly Dameshek: Jake had been developing normally, but he has been heading all of his mouth chunks, he was talking, he was running, he was jumping he was, I mean all the incredible things that all new parents goes through and suddenly it stalled and stopped and then it went backwards.
By the time he was diagnosed back at like an eight month old baby level at 24months old, no language, he had no -- lost all language but no longer pick up fork or spoon, wouldn't feed himself, wouldn't even pick up a sip of cup just basically sat and just staring the space at me.
Sarah Spence: The second is a deficit in social skills or social relatedness and that is really what every other child does naturally which is to become engaged with their parents, with their siblings, with their peers that's very difficult for children on the Autism Spectrum.
Kimberly Dameshek: It didn't matter what was going on in the household you know, his parents or his brother, or the dog, in the family did know nothing. He was like a zombie and we were all furniture but what happens is a sort of he lives in a box, so everything is right here for him, anything that's outside the box isn't happening for Jake, in a room, colors, people, noises he stays right here.
Sarah Spence: And finally is the presence of either restricted interest. So really over-focused on something or repetitive behaviors and the repetitive behaviors are things that most people thing about with Autism like flapping the hands, and spinning around and, but it can be really lot of different things.
Kimberly Dameshek: He fixates, he obsesses, he does what's called stimming, he'll pick up things, like a bunch of things, it doesn't matter it can be, it can be cards, it can be marbles, it can be rocks, it can be sand at the beach, but he gets it front of his face and he loves to go like this and swatch it all, trickle down.
Sarah Spence: Over the years, they have actually gone away from the old term of Pervasive Developmental Disorder to an Autism Spectrum Disorder and they named it Spectrum for a reason because there's a huge range of behaviors and severity of deficits that go along with having a child, who has a diagnoses of Autism.
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