Team sports are great if you can get into them, and completely pointless if they disdain them. Individually oriented physical activities that emphasise co-ordination are good for dyspraxia e.g. dance, martial arts, gymnastics. Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social skills. Premature advice: acting, improv, debating are all good for socialisation. They're likely to be nerdier than normal, encourage this, and making friends of like interests as otherwise the chances of having no friends whatsoever until they get to a big high school or college are high (unless you live in a major urban area) If you can get them into a gifted and talented programme, whether a summer school or a proper day school do so. They are likely to put no effort whatsoever into tasks and subjects that don't interest them, give up on this pre-emptively. Try to make sure they encounter challenging material relatively early in their education. I was ~16 by the time4 I got to that and nine years later my capacity for necessary grinding work is still low.

Thanks for the suggestions.

>Spend lots of time explaining the blidingly obvious in terms of social skills.

This is going to be interesting, especially for my wife. As I suspect I'm a bit of an Aspie myself, I can see social rules from an outsider's perspective. She'll have more trouble explaining why, for example, one (at least in America) can not mention an obese person's size in his/her presence. He knows he's fat, he knows that we know he's fat, and he we know that he knows that we know, etc/ Sp. whats the issue? That's a hard one. How do you explain the irrationality of allowing the fat person to suspend disbelief that we're thinking, "Oh mah gawd, you're really f'ing fat!"

The reality is, autism spectrum diagnoses are done with checklists. If you observe six of more symptoms out of a list of 12 than there is an autism diagnosis, if there is something less you have a not-quite-autism diagnosis. Depending on the practitioner it gets labeled high funcioning autism, asperger's, or my favorite Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

Basically it's a class of generic "something is wrong" but not with the severity of autism. Since the physiological pathways for these diseases are not well understood the diagnoses by definition are going to be a bit mushy.

That said, my son was diagnosed with autism to great degree because of a speech delay. His speech is improved so I'm not sure if he would qualify now, but he does still have physical symptoms. For example he flaps his arms a lot when he gets excited, he loves rough play, he has a hard time finding objects using verbal instructions "grab your shoes buddy" and some other random things.

Does he need a label? I think so. I think he benefited some from his therapy and special education in the public schools and a diagnosis helps determine which therapies might help and which won't. Is he going to be socially slower than he would have been if he'd just been treated like a normal kid. I don't think so; especially since a huge chuck of the kids in special ed in Arizona are just native Spanish speakers.

I think you're right to worry that parents will change their behavior based on a label, there just seems to be some worthwhile things that come out of formal diagnosis and whether or not to get one for a child is a serious parenting decision that has lots of consequences, good and bad.

EDIT: parent was worried about negative consequences of an Asperger's diagnosis on the child.

I didn't get a chance to read the parent posting before it was killed. Are we, his parents worried that labeling might do harm? Sure. But, we're a lot more worried that not taking preventative/corrective action would be a lot worse.

Our son is attending our public school's early intervention pre-school program (fantastic, btw), and we're sending him to private speech therapy and are considering other interventions.

Diagnosis wise, I agree with your view. Why not HFA or PDD-Nos? There's definitely something wrong though -- he shows little interest in playing with other children, physically cringes when there's lots of noise/confusion, and does a bunch of other stuff that strongly suggests an autism spectrum disorder.

OCD is one problem that is more common among Aspie's than in the general population; probably because some quirks in autism already tend that way (like flapping, rocking, and obsessive interests).