Autism is a disorder that displays different levels of symptoms in different patients. While there are a lot of symptoms that are autism characteristics, not all of them can be found in a single patient. Mostly these autism characteristics vary in intensity in different patients. Therefore, this disorder can often be hard to recognize. Below is a list of characteristics you can look for. If you think that it is possible that your child may have autism be sure to speak with your child’s doctor so they can run their own tests.

Autism Characteristics and Social Skills

• Experiences difficulty in making eye contact
• Difficulty in initiating conversation in social circles
• Experiences difficulty in explaining things about themselves
• Finds it difficult to understand emotions or feelings of other people
• Overly prompt in trusting people, without recognizing or comprehending any ulterior motive
• Friendships become increasingly tough to maintain
• Makes friends with people who are either elder or younger to them
• Can oscillate widely between states of aloofness and over friendliness.
• Does not feel much interested in matters of other people.

Autism Characteristics and Language Skills

• Delayed speech in autistic children, when compared to normal children of their age
• Sometimes speech may start at the right age, but language skills start deteriorating later on
• Speaks with inappropriate and excessive stress on pitch and intonation
• May repeat the name of a person excessively when speaking to them
• Whispering is quite difficult
• Speaks either very loudly or in an excessively soft tone
• May form sentences that are either quite short or incomplete.
• Repetition of the last words or phrases that are heard.

Autism Characteristics and Behavior

• Develops a preference for rocking motions of the body
• Repetitive movements like spinning, licking, rocking, tapping, flapping arms etc
• Obsessive about certain parts of objects, rather than focusing on the entire object. For instance an autistic child may focus on just one leg of the doll, while she ignores playing with the doll.
• Experiences a lag in both fine and gross motor skills, when compared to people of their age
• May not be capable of assessing or comprehending dangerous situations
• Experiences extreme fear or phobia for no perceptible reason.
• May find doing certain tasks to be quite difficult and may be a perfectionist at doing some others.
• May indulge in violent behavior that may be injurious to themselves, like banging their heads repeatedly on the wall.
• Impatience and difficulty in waiting for something
• May not understand how long is 10 minutes or may find it difficult to understand instructions like front, back, before, etc.

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