Can Your Child Outgrow Her Diagnosis?

Sunday's Friendship Circle email was packed with interesting articles relating to special needs.

The most eye catching being Study: Some Children Can Outgrow Autism. The actual story was a little on the light side, I thought. But, the question raised by this article, Can a child outgrow autism?, is very much an attention getter. Can We Really "Cure" Autism? was a little better, so read that one, too. But, I felt the best explanation of this came from the NIMH article Study Documents that Some Children Lose Autism Diagnosis.

I am not first hand familiar with autism, so I don't know what your child's doctor tells you at your appointment with regards to your child's future. But, for children with a developmental delay, we were told, there is no way to know if your child will be able to "close the gap" between themselves and regular children their age. The up side of developmental delay is that kids can make progress towards closing that gap. I don't know how it is viewed in the autism community, but if the comments left on these articles are any indication, many families are not going to simply part ways with their diagnosis. And I really don't understand that.

For me, the hope that Patty will be able to catchup to her peers is very helpful as we watch her struggle to learn things that come so easy for most kids. It's wonderful to see the progress she's making, and that means the gap is closing, even if it is just a little at a time. In our journey, closing the gap is the hope I need to get me through those really trying, difficult days. Saying that I want to cure her of her delay is an understatement. I want to annihilate her delay so that it simply never existed. The day we can shed the diagnosis of developmental delay will be the one of the happiest days of my life.