I'm looking over some of my 16 year olds school records...just picked them up on Friday....and in 2000 ..when he got the full testing from most all the diff. types of doctors from the school...an occupational therapist wrote that she/he thought that my son may have dyspraxia....and attributed to impaired tactile and proprioceptive processing.
I looked up dyspraxia....and saw a lot of autistic behaviors as well....or is it just my imagination?
This is the first time I've heard of him possibly having this...isn't that odd?
It is pretty disgusting when the school doesn't communicate important observations to you, like the OT's suspicion of dyspraxia, or when my son's teacher and assistant didn't tell me that he had a meltdown at school and said he "didn't want to live anymore" (I found out a couple weeks later. Luckily it wasn't a real death wish, but "scripted language" meant to convey that he wanted to escape from an intolerable situation).
No, it's not your imagination that dyspraxia resembles autism. In fact, I was recently invited to a seminar on therapy for verbal dyspraxia, because the subject matter is also relevant for those of us dealing with autism.
The National Center for Learning Disabilities in the US calls it a "learning disability in motor skills." You can read two fact sheets on it here:
http://www.ncld.org/content/view/467/391/
http://www.ncld.org/content/view/466/391/