Transcript: Key Early Signs of ADHD & Autism Every Concerned Mum Should Understand
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Helen Thompson: Welcome to First Time Mum’s Chat, the podcast for new mums, navigating the exciting and often overwhelming journey of parenthood. I’m your host, Helen Thompson, a child care educator, baby massage instructor, with over 20 years of experience helping parents connect with their little ones in meaningful and supportive ways.
In this episode, I’m joined by the wonderful Leanne Tran, a registered psychologist who specializes in early childhood development. We’re diving into a topic that so many new parents wonder about. How do you spot the early signs of ADHD or autism in your baby? And what can you do to support their development?
Leanne brings over 15 years of experience helping parents just like you and in this episode she shares how to recognize those subtle signs that might indicate your little one needs extra support. Whether it’s understanding sensory sensitivities or navigating eye contact and connection, we’ll explore practical non-medication strategies to help you feel confident in your parenting.
Have you ever wondered if your baby’s behavior is typical or if it’s time to ask for help? Are you looking for ways to create a calm, nurturing environment for your little one? If so, this episode is for you. By the end of our chat, you’ll feel empowered with knowledge and equipped with simple, actionable steps to support your baby’s unique development So, go and grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let’s dive into this valuable conversation with Leanne Tran.
Leanne, I’m so excited to have you join me today. Your work supporting families as they navigate the early stages of childhood development is truly remarkable. With your many years of experience helping parents understand and address the early signs of ADHD and autism, you’ve become such a trusted guide for so many. Can you share with us what led you to focus on this vital area and how you empower parents to support their little ones during these critical early years?
Leanne Tran: Yeah, sure, thank you so much for having me. I really, interestingly wanted to be a teacher when I was in high school, but made the switch to psychology because I could see some of the parallels between still teaching, but it’s about the human experience rather than about literacy and numeracy. I always felt like I didn’t quite fit in at school and so I’m drawn to work with kids who find that experience or have, maybe things be a bit harder or they can’t do what other kids do as naturally. I’ve done that for over 15 years now, and I’ve really recognized that it’s parents who can make the difference and are the ones who support their children the most.
So I’ve shifted my work to trying to help children through just helping parents with education and information and giving them practical skills they can use in their parenting.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I can relate to that because when I was at school I didn’t really feel that I fitted in either. I was lucky I had parents that could support me. I had a father who was a teacher and he was very supportive and he managed to guide me through. Some mums don’t have that and they don’t know where to start. So I guess that’s where you come in to give them support.
Leanne Tran: Yeah, that’s right. It’s so common that parents will say to me too, that they just don’t really know if something is typical or not. Often, it’s their first child. Children are very different, you have one and it goes okay, and you have another who could be totally different. Parents often ask that question, is what my child is doing normal, or is it something to be concerned about? I think that probably leads into the first point of recognizing the early signs is that feeling or intuition that moms often have about maybe needing extra help.
Helen Thompson: Yeah and if they’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed and anxious, that’s a hard thing for them too. What are some of the simple ways they can start to understand a baby’s development without getting caught up with all that worry and all that fear of overwhelm and being anxious?
Leanne Tran: I think, it’s hard because all babies are very different. So I think there’s a very wide range of normal there for babies. Once you’re getting up to the points, maybe it’s around 12 months or so with that development of things like speech, that’s a point to maybe notice what’s going on with the babies around you.
I think parents groups are really great for that because you can see the development that kids are following. Or early on, maybe it’s about how well you feel your child can connect to you through maybe looking at you with eye contact and mimicking facial expressions or emotions and that kind of thing. Th ose are some of those early social communication type behaviours that might develop differently if a child is autistic.
Helen Thompson: So if you want to create a calming environment for your baby who may show signs of sensory activity or overstimulation, what can you do?
Leanne Tran: Yeah, just going back to the eye contact briefly, I think because it’s very normal for babies to use that as a way to regulate their own emotions as well. So babies will look away when they’re overstimulated and they kind of need a break. So don’t be too alarmed, there’s lots of natural times where they will look away.
I think, it’s more so a sense that mums get that there’s something there that they’re expecting from their baby in terms of that eye contact and connection that they’re just having difficulty getting. So that feeling more so is the thing that might lead to you asking for help, from a doctor or pediatrician or somebody else. It’s more like it’s a pattern as well. So it’s not just one particular day. You get the sense over weeks and months that it’s a consistent thing. It’s really about trying to be attuned into what your baby’s individual signs are for needing help and comfort.
So it might mean that you get the sense through repetition, that they don’t like being held in this way, or they do like being held in this way, or, and some autistic babies and kids prefer to calm on their own with a person just near them, rather than touching them and holding them. So it’s trying to work out, through patterns and repetition, what works for your child and what doesn’t work.
Helen Thompson: Does it also relate to if they’re not sitting or not watching what you’re doing. They’re just having solitary play. They’re just constantly playing on their own. Is that an effect of autism as well? I know that sometimes kids just might want to sit on their own and play by themselves.
I know through development, through my childcare, there is solitary play and parallel play and all that. I think there’s a time when you look at them and you think, well, hang on a moment, at this age, this child should be doing this. So what sort of age should parents be looking at for that kind of development?
Leanne Tran: For play, it’s anywhere from around, probably 12 months would be my guide, traditionally we used to think about it as though the typical way of playing and developing is the right way to go, but we’ve moved away from that now and recognise that playing alone or next to somebody, which is the parallel play you talked about, could just be the preference in the way kids like to do it. It’s not necessarily something we have to change anymore. It’s definitely like you mentioned, a sign that perhaps the development’s following a different path and that’s a great opportunity for parents to look out or to seek some help about how they can support their child because it’s likely to be different from the typical ways parents support their kids.
So from about 12 months, whenever they’re kind of starting to interact and play around with other kids. So I’d say 12 months, but earlier, I think you can notice the signs between a parent and a child. Usually it’s about things like joint attention and that kind of thing. So working out that you’re both paying attention to the same kind of thing. I’m trying to think of an easy example to give. It might be for example, seeing an animal at the park and kind of looking, it’s common for kids to look at the animal and then look at a parent to kind of say, you seeing this too? That’s a really great example of that joint attention, which is sometimes not present in kids who are autistic.
Helen Thompson: So when it comes to ADHD and the autism, what’s the difference?
Leanne Tran: Yeah, that’s a good question and it’s something that I think still is not very well known. ADHD, I it stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder but really it’s about more than just attention. It’s about regulation in general. So it’s a difficulty regulating things like attention, but also emotions and behavior. So regulating attention, that’s why kids have trouble focusing because they don’t know what to pay attention to. They’re having trouble regulating it. With behavior, it’s often impulsivity where they’re acting before thinking it through, or maybe it’s hyperactivity where they’re just kind of on the go the whole time and that’s the difficulty with regulating behavior.
I think it’s important to say that, some pediatricians I work with say that at the age of 3 or under, all kids look like they have ADHD. Yeah, they’re just full on and they’re exploring and playing. So I think for ADHD, it’s not something to be concerned about so much until a bit later.
Autism is separate to that in the difference in the way that people process communication and how they interact socially, how they manage with sensory input and preferences and then there’s usually an element of preference for repetition or sameness in autism. So some of the differences then between ADHD and autism are that with the sensory processing, that’s usually a difficulty in autism. with the routine and that kind of stuff is usually about autism, whereas, people with ADHD are more adaptable, but they might struggle with being organized. So you’ve got the different ends of the spectrum there. With social interaction, that’s a key difference in autism but sometimes if kids are really quite hyperactive or really inattentive with ADHD, that can cause social interactions difficulties as well.
So the other thing to mention too is that the two overlap. So it’s fairly common if somebody is autistic that they’ll also have ADHD and the reverse. So that’s why they talked about together. a lot because they overlap.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, it was interesting what you said about self regulation and being able to regulate, because I’ve worked with kids who’ve got ADHD, I don’t know whether it’s ADHD or autism, I’ll just use the term broadly because I’m not sure which one it is and they’ve actually found it really hard to regulate.
One particular kid I worked with just let it all out and was really angry and really just couldn’t control himself. I remember walking him home from school and I had his brother and sister, and I just let him walk home from school by himself. He was doing his bit, he was stamping and shaking his arms and doing all that but once he got home after about 5 minutes of just calming down he just came up to me and he said, Helen, I’m really sorry for my behaviour and I was really touched by that. I just said to him, look, you don’t have to apologize to me. I understand where you were at and I thanked him. I said, thank you for apologizing to me.
That brings in another question, how would you advise parents or caregivers to support the child who is going through that?
Leanne Tran: think it’s a lot about co regulation. If a child doesn’t have the ability to self regulate, it means they can’t do it independently. So they need an adult to do it with them. It’s going to look different for each child, but probably the things I often say to parents is to use much less language than you usually would. If kids are really upset like that, they’re not processing much. So even simple words or single words like, stop, if in that case that boy was near the road or something, it would just be a single word. Some of the other words are, yeah, it’s okay, or I’m here, and just being there with the child while they kind of run through those emotions.
They usually come down on their own. When kids get really heightened, it naturally will come down. I think the challenge lots of parents can run into is they try to say too much or help too much and then that keeps re escalating the situation. Then parents get upset, of course, because it’s very stressful and then everybody’s heightened and it becomes more difficult.
So trying to use less words, give some space, but also while you’re keeping the safety and then really just let the child do what they need to do to get those emotions out. If it is stamping, if it’s kicking at the ground and that kind of thing. Even in the extreme cases where it’s difficult behavior, like maybe swearing and being rude, the strategy is still the same. It’s just that those kids need a lot more help to try to learn skills to prevent that happening again.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, this kid I was talking about also had an incident in the pool. I think he was overstimulated and he was finding the sensory of the water and the pool too much. It was the first time it had actually happened so I just called the parent and said, help. Then I learned afterwards why he was doing it and watched what the parent was doing. He took the child out of the pool and just let him sit there for a while. Then once he calmed down, I noticed he then went up to him and said, look, come on, mate, let’s get dressed, we’ve got to get you home and then you can process this. I find that really interesting because I actually learnt a lot more about what to do.
It was really interesting to observe because he did exactly what you’ve just described, taking him out of danger away from the other kids because he was splashing and just getting out of control. He took him away from there, but also let him be on his own for a while to calm down. In a pool situation like that, when you’ve got a lot of kids around, it’s hard to know what to do because they don’t want to be touched, they don’t want you to pick them up because they’re in such a bad way. That was interesting to observe what he did.
Leanne Tran: Mm.
Helen Thompson: You don’t have any other tips on what you can do in that situation?
Leanne Tran: Not in that time, because it’s really the time of where the priority is just keeping everyone safe and keeping the situation under control rather than letting it escalate. Then some of the things that you can work on with children to develop their skills are things like awareness of emotions and the body signs that they have so they recognize those feelings are coming and then regulation strategies, like being able to take deep breaths or think about something else or whatever they need to do to help themselves feel better. Sometimes it’s problem solving skills as well. Obviously with little kids and toddlers, the problem solving is not something they’ve developed the capacity for yet, but yeah, for older kids, it’s thinking through and teaching them, if you have some time when you don’t know what to do, you might need to ask for help or to get out of the pool in that situation. So sort of lead the situation or do some deep breathing or emotional regulation stuff or use words to tell someone how you feel. It’s building their capacity to do that, will help in future situations.
Helen Thompson: What about routines? Is it advisable to encourage them to have a particular routine of the day? For instance, I’m thinking of a kid in a classroom and the teacher’s doing everything with the other kids and this kid just isn’t into that. He may have his own agenda and his own routine. I guess that’s a good thing to encourage, yes, a particular routine.
Leanne Tran: Yeah, I think routines are great for all children. Maybe that’s just me because I like routines as well. I think it’s almost a way of communicating the boundaries and the structure of a family home or at kindy and school and kids with autism and also kids with anxiety will often feel secure when there’s a routine. I think it helps with ADHD as well because there’s predictability, so kids, if they can predict what’s happening, they feel a lot more calm and secure.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I’m like you, I believe in routines as well. I was thinking more of the autistic and the ADHD kids, sometimes they may not fit into that category of a routine. They think, this is my routine, this is my agenda and it doesn’t quite fit into the routine of your family or your school environment.
Leanne Tran: As a family, you have more flexibility with that and you might build in then things that help your autistic child, but also the other things that help the day run. It is a challenge particularly with school, when the routine that other people want is very different to the routine that the child wants. In those cases there’s things that you can teach kids as well, like flexible thinking and that kind of stuff but that is the long road to change. So often it’s about changing how we do things as parents or as teachers to minimize the difficulty or stress the child’s experiencing.
Helen Thompson: That’s sometimes quite hard to do, especially in a school environment because if you’ve got one child who’s got ADHD or autism, and if everybody else is doing what the teacher wants and it’s hard to help that child regulate and help that child in that situation to be supported because unless you’ve got people helping you in the classroom, it can be very hard because that child can be very distracting to the others. He or she can distract the other children and bringing the other children in, it must be incredibly hard for teachers to do that.
Leanne Tran: Yeah, it is and I think because on the flip side too, that if they don’t find ways to adapt the schedule for the child having trouble, that child will become dysregulated and then that’s really distracting and difficult to handle in the class environment as well. So it really is about trying to work out from the beginning a way that both can exist at the same time.
Sometimes it’s about the children, or the class has a certain routine, but the autistic child might be able to do stuff a bit differently in the back of the class. Or with ADHD as well, and sometimes it’s just as much as with ADHD, it might be as simple as just letting them walk around rather than having them sit in their seat. They can follow the same routine, but if they don’t have to sit down, they’re able to manage the expectations a lot better.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I think teachers have got to become more aware of that because it’s not only ADHD and autism. A lot of kids find it much easier to learn when they’re moving and they’re moving around because I know that was the case with me when I was at school. I needed to get up and move and walk.
I took things in a lot more if I was doing that and I found it incredibly hard. I don’t have ADHD or autism, but I did have a mild form of dyslexia and I found if I got up and I walked around and moved, I actually learned a lot more. I took in a lot more and the teachers always used to reprimand me for that, saying, Helen, sit down and concentrate.
I found that hard because I needed to move to concentrate. I think teachers today are beginning to realize that more. They’re beginning to realize more and I think this is where you’re saying to encourage children and teachers to let the children move more and learn through movement.
Leanne Tran: Yeah, that’s right and I think where it becomes really hard is where we still kind of have those traditional expectations that everyone will sit in the seat. It’s hard, if you imagine letting all kids learn how they need to, if that’s moving around or walking, how does that work in a situation where you’ve got one teacher and 24 kids? Whereas if we rethink that, maybe it works a lot better if there are higher ratios or smaller classrooms or a lot more flexibility, but that’s just not quite how school was set up yet.
Helen Thompson: No, sadly not. So are there any other bits of advice or topics that you’d like to discuss?
Leanne Tran: Yeah thank you. I would encourage parents to just ask for help if they are unsure, because I think sometimes there’s a stigma about seeing a child psychologist still, or a GP or pediatrician, maybe. So I would encourage parents to always, if you’re unsure, ask for help and the worst thing that will happen is someone says, look, this is all going well, I know that it’s hard, but you’re doing great, if the child’s doing fine. That’s a great reassurance to get, I think. If on the chances that your child’s developing differently, the earlier you can learn some different ways to connect and do your parenting a little bit differently, the better it will be for both your child and for you. So yeah, it’s never too early to ask for help if you’ve had this gut feeling that something’s not quite right, or you just don’t quite know what to do.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, so where can parents learn more about your work and reach out to you if they’d like more guidance as they begin their parenting journey?
Leanne Tran: Yeah, if they’d like to reach out to me, my website’s a great place, which is Learn.LeanneTran.com.au. Yeah, that’s probably the best place. I have a newsletter where I write some tips each week for families and have programs to work one on one with parents if that’s something they feel like they would benefit from.
Helen Thompson: Thank you, Leanne, for being here. I really appreciate your time. It’s always a pleasure talking to somebody in the same hemisphere as me.
Leanne Tran: You’re welcome.
Helen Thompson: Thank you for joining me on this insightful episode of First Time Mum’s Chat. I hope our conversation with Leanne Tran has provided you with valuable guidance on recognizing early signs of ADHD and autism in your little one.
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