Share the first part of F.'s story for readers on Sleuth! When and why did you start to feel concerned?

My son started talking and walking at 10 months old. For all we could tell - and for all the doctors could tell - he was typical. You could ask him, “What does a cat say?” and he would answer. He would play peekaboo. He was engaged, and he had probably 30 words by the time he was 18 months old. I noticed at around that 15-month mark that he was not saying “Mama.” My husband said, “He's saying it. Do you hear him? He says, ‘Mom.’” I said, “I don’t think so.” That was the first thing that I questioned. He would say words, and then he would stop using them. Then, on top of that, he wouldn't eat very much variety. The doctors told me, “Oh, he's fine. Lots of kids are like that. As long as he's eating yogurt and those fruit pouches, he's fine. Don't worry about it.” So I didn't give it much thought. Then, at around 18 months, some of his words started changing. He went from saying “bite” to saying “bing,” and then he lost that word completely. I was pregnant with my second child at the time. F. was going to be 22 months old when I had my second one. At around the 20-month mark, he quit eating even more, dropped even more safe foods and then dropped even more words. By the time he was 22 months, right around the birth of my second child, he lost basically all of his words, and his level of social engagement dropped to very little. A friend of mine was getting married, so we traveled out of state from Georgia to Oklahoma to go to her wedding. That's when it was the worst. We realized just how far into himself he had gone. My family was there with us, and we all thought, “He's just not engaging at all.” He went through a regression, basically. In December, at the age of two, he wasn’t responding to us and there were no words at all.

Share the first part of Y.'s story for readers on Sleuth! When and why did you start to feel concerned?

My son was two and a half years old when the nursery staff called us - me and his father - for a meeting. They said he has severe tantrums and he doesn't want to play with anyone. He wants to do what he wants to do, not to follow the class rules. He sticks to a certain toy or a certain activity and doesn't want to leave it. His school referred us to the Learning Resource Center, which is a beautiful and professional center in Egypt. We had a multidisciplinary assessment at first. We answered questions with: “No, No, No… He doesn't have tantrums. He plays with his friends,” and so on. After the parent intake at the Learning Resource Center, they scheduled the child assessment. During this time, we realized that we answered, “No,” but actually, we could have said, “Yes.” He puts blocks into a tower. He follows the lines in the floor. He doesn't answer his name. We called the doctor to correct our answers. Then, at the first examination, my son completed a cognitive screening and later did an autism spectrum disorder test. We were told he is on the autism spectrum with a moderate degree. I had a panic attack. We decided to see many - too many - doctors. Some of them said that he is borderline because of his age or we cannot diagnose him accurately at this moment, we have to wait three years. Another doctor said, “No. He is not autistic at all.”