***

An early, great gift of an autism spectrum diagnosis—because all too many families to this day are given to wait and see, are given a comfortable clinical evasion that hardens irreversibly at the later ages of seven and eight into suggestive of infantile autism, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, probably autistic disorder.

Whatever a diagnostician calls it, however he or she connects it to autism, it is a relief to know, a gift to know early, since any form of autism’s downstream cascade of developing disability is something dangerous to ignore.