Not knowing what to expect, I went along as suggested by CAMHS to the parenting course, this ran for 12 weeks every Friday morning and George was given a place in the crèche. This was the first time he’d ever been left so I was pleased to see a family friend, who George knows from church and toddler group, was running it. He was in safe hands. Henry was still tiny and in the sling asleep for most of the sessions. I met lots of other parents, mostly with slightly older children and enjoyed going each week. We had “homework” tasks to complete and sheets to fill in to track our progress with each new technique we learnt. It soon started to become clear, that whilst the other parents were seeing a big improvement, no matter how hard I tried or how closely I followed the new techniques, George was following his own agenda and if anything, his behaviour was becoming even more of a concern.
Things came to a head one afternoon when George, on one of his rampages, trashed the house once again. At the end of my tether I phoned the course leader in tears. She came straight to the house and had a chat, she agreed to help us take things with George to the next step and try and get to the bottom of his troubles. We arranged a few sessions at the children’s centre to fill in some background information whilst George was looked after in the crèche. During this process it was gingerly suggested to me that we might be looking at the Autistic spectrum. I wasn’t convinced this was the case, despite George having many of the tell-tale signs there were not enough to meet the diagnosis criteria.
A meeting was arranged with myself, my course leader and the Health visitor to get the ball rolling on another referral to CAMHS.
The referral went off to CAMHS eventually and all we could now do was wait.
