Faults in Diagnosis of Autism & Spectrum Disorder
Episode 232
In this episode of Integrative You Radio, Dr. Nicole Rivera explores the impact of the environment on child development, inspired by her family's recent move to Italy. She shares insights on how her nearly three-year-old son, Quentin, has thrived through hands-on, tactile experiences, and discusses the importance of recognizing different learning styles, such as auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Dr. Nicole challenges the conventional approach to diagnosing developmental delays and spectrum disorders, advocating for a more individualized understanding of children's unique ways of learning and interacting with the world. She encourages parents to support their children's natural inclinations and to consider the value of physicality, creativity, and emotional intelligence in their overall development. Tune in to learn more! What you’ll learn: Environment Matters: Changing a child's environment can significantly impact their development and growth, as seen with Dr. Nicole's son in Italy. Learning Styles: Children have diverse learning styles (auditory, visual, kinesthetic), and recognizing these can help better support their individual needs. Holistic Development: Emphasizing physical, creative, and emotional intelligence is crucial in nurturing a child's overall development, beyond traditional academic measures. Quotes: "We need to embrace the idea that intelligence isn’t just about book smarts, but also about how we challenge and expand our physical and creative abilities." - Dr. Nicole "Children who take in information differently aren’t lacking—they’re tapping into unique ways of understanding the world that can lead to incredible growth."- Dr. Nicole Curious about Integrative You? Dive into Integrative You Radio with Dr. Nicole Rivera, where she explores the intersections of holistic health, personal growth, and living in alignment with your core values. Each episode provides insights and practical advice to help you achieve a more fulfilling and energized life. L
Topics: development, integrative, nicole, learning, child, unknown, environment, children
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## Faults in Diagnosis of Autism & Spectrum Disorder
- Environmental Influence:** A change in environment can profoundly impact a child's development, fostering growth and adaptation.
- Diverse Learning Styles:** Recognizing and supporting auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning preferences is key to individual child development.
- Holistic Intelligence:** True intelligence encompasses physical abilities, creativity, and emotional understanding, not just academic achievement.
- Individualized Approach:** Children who process information differently are not at a deficit but possess unique ways of understanding the world.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U Radio.
**Unknown:** You have Dr. Nicole today. I am flying solo, and I'm bringing to you a topic that is actually more thought-provoking, more than me bringing a level of expertise to this. This is more about thinking critically, thinking outside the box for something that I feel like is happening very, very, very often.
**Unknown:** So let me preface with this. More recently, I was asking our social media audience, you know, "What, what do you guys wanna hear about?" You know, "What are some really great podcast topics that I can bring to Integrative U Radio?" And everything was all over the map. But we had many people say, "Tell us about Italy and your move to Italy." And so I was thinking, you know, there's so many ways that I can go with that conversation, but it actually brought me back to a topic that I had a private conversation with my husband, Dr. Nick, about.
**Unknown:** And we have a little boy. Quentin is almost three now, which is crazy. And it's just been really amazing to observe his development and to observe how he has been growing, how he's been interacting with his environment, how he's taking in information, how he's processing information. And in addition to that, I work with a lot of kids, and I work with kids that are a month old all the way up to teenage years.
**Unknown:** But there's been a big influx of younger children that have had diagnoses, and these diagnoses have been from developmental delays to autism to Asperger's to Spectrum. There's so many different names now for these differences, these discrepancies in, quote unquote, "normal development." And I'm saying quote unquote very intentionally, because we have a textbook version of what development should look like, and we are not considering that there is a bio-individuality when it comes to development. So how the heck does this actually, uh, connect back to the whole Italy comment? So coming to Italy, I started to really think about, you know, what would be a valuable topic to discuss about this journey, this, this adventure that we're on.
**Unknown:** And what I realized is that this has so much to do with us putting ourselves in an environment where we can live in alignment with our values, which allow us to be the best versions of ourselves, and this is also allowing Quentin, our son, to be the best version of himself. And he has had access to the ability to, to climb and swim and be on a very, very different terrain that has expanded him in ways that his old environment would have never expanded him. But a lot of this expansion that I'm talking about is, is tactile, it's hands-on, it's, it's physical. And I feel like this is something that's not talked about.
**Unknown:** And we talk about how boys are... They develop s- more slowly than, uh, little girls. Their speech is going to be more delayed than girls. And, and you know, we have these common things that are talked about, but no one's elaborating and taking it a step further, and helping parents to understand, why are these differences?
**Unknown:** What's normal? What's not? How can we lean in to help our child's development? So the conversation that I had with Dr.
**Unknown:** Nick that connected back to me thinking about Italy and thinking about my child having so much expansion when it comes to his physical body, his movement, his strength, his sensory intake. The conversation was about kids that are being deemed developing, de- developmentally delayed, autistic spectrum, and/or Asperger's. And I posed the question to my husband, I said, "Do you think that these kids are just actually way more tactile and kinesthetic, and no one knows how to work with that?" And so let me explain what that means. There's a world of neuro-linguistic programming.
**Unknown:** Neuro-linguistic programming, I'm gonna give you, like, the CliffsNotes, For Dummies version.There's, there's categories of how we take in information. One of those categories is auditory. We can listen to someone speak, we can listen to a presentation, we can listen to an audiobook, and we can take in that inter- that information, and we can absorb it, understand it, and process it, comprehend it well. There are other people that are more visual, and they are gonna do better with a picture.
**Unknown:** They're gonna do better with someone drawing a diagram. They're always going to take in information and retain it and comprehend it better when there's a visual aspect. That is personally me, and many people that I know. Then there is kinesthetic.
**Unknown:** Kinesthetic are the individuals that have to put their hands on it. So, you know, you can sit there and ha- give someone a book on how to repair the transmission on a car. You can give them an audiobook. You can give them...
**Unknown:** You can send them to a, a seminar on how to repair the transmission, and some of them will say, "I... Nope, I can't do it." But if they go and they play with the pieces of the transmission, and they essentially get their hands on it and start to work with it, they can learn through that avenue. And so some of these individuals, they end up becoming artists, engineers, mechanics. They're, they're, they're leaning in to their kinesthetic hands-on abilities.
**Unknown:** And in so, in my observation, I find that boys, little boys tend to be more hands-on, hence why they are swinging and hanging from the rafters and doing wild and crazy shit. There is other neurological aspects of that, but that's for a different podcast. But in addition to that, some of the children that I have worked with, especially young boys, that have been deemed to have developmental delays or socialization disorders, autism, Asperger's, et cetera, they are not speaking. They're not overly social, but they can look at different cue cards, like different books, and they can remember everything from those books from the colors to the numbers to the animals.
**Unknown:** They tend to be able to build things. They're constantly getting immersed. And a- again, we're saying, "Oh, they're not social. They don't wanna play with the other kids," but they're sitting there, like, building Legos or building something from some type of kids' kit or toys.
**Unknown:** Or they're in the dirt playing with the rocks. They're building sandcastles, et cetera. And so it's just a very interesting observation is that when we're talking about these kids, we might notice certain things when they're young, but there is a lot of children that are getting diagnosed with these disorders, especially when they get into school. And think about school.
**Unknown:** Most of you have been to a, a school. If it's a public school, a private school, Ivy League school, it doesn't matter. Most of the information being delivered in the school system is being delivered auditory. It's being delivered by someone speaking and delivering the information from the textbook.
**Unknown:** Yes, maybe they're writing on a chalkboard or a whiteboard or something like that, but typically they are writing words on that. So it's still the same style of information coming in the same way. When you think about it, there are not many, many opportunities for kids that are more hands-on to learn through that avenue. Heck, I'm visual, and that is something that w- it was very difficult for me to read a book or listen to a teacher and gain information that way, but as soon as you took a very complex topic and you showed me a picture or you showed me a diagram, it was like, boom, got it.
**Unknown:** And so obviously I did not understand that about myself as a young child. It just felt like school was hard. And it's frus- these kids get frustrated, so then we move into frustration and tantrums, which then is another layer to these diagnoses. So the moral of the story is, is that when we think about our kids and helping in their development, having that hands-on development is a huge part of development.
**Unknown:** It's not just about can they take a te- can they read a book and take a test? That is such a small piece. When you think about your adult life, how much of your adult life is that? How much of it?
**Unknown:** Right now, I'm in the process of learning Italian. I could do a written test and write... I will look like I'm an expert in Italian, but if an Italian comes up to me and starts speaking to me and I have to respond in the moment, it's very difficult. It's two different skill sets.
**Unknown:** So the fact that we classify intelligence and IQ based on test-taking is crazy because is that actually shaping you to be a great person? Is it shaping you for success in your future? I think about some of my friends that were deemed to have learning issues. They literally had a special aide while we were in school.
**Unknown:** One of those individuals is the most talented storyteller, entertainer, w- people connector ever.He, if he had the right mentor, the right insight, the right tools, the right guidance, he could have been a super powerful CEO. He could have been a super powerful salesperson. He could have been... He could have had a lot of opportunities ahead of him, but he was deemed to actually not be smart and was told not to go to college.
**Unknown:** So he ended up going and, and focusing on his athletic abilities, and which was fantastic for many years, but those athletic abilities, as you get older, it's not always feasible because of injuries and repetitive stress, and your body can't do what it used to do, unless you come to IntegrativeU. Sidebar. In addition to that is I, I have many friends that were extremely creative, extremely good with their hands, and some of them went on to be very high-paid stylists, very high-paid people in the fashion industry. So at the end of the day, it's not that being kinesthetic is a downside, it's a part of us, and there are certain things that you and I might do that we might better understand or perceive by getting our hands on it.
**Unknown:** And so we need to embrace this for our children. We need to make sure that this isn't just about book smarts, but this is about challenging their physical body, challenging their ability to create through these hands-on types of activities, and we should not be so quick to pathologize something, to call it a disease, to call it a disorder. Because I truly, truly believe that these individuals that are being classified as, you know, spectrum, they just take information in very, very differently. They take information in in a way that the world doesn't offer it regularly.
**Unknown:** And so it's just take a step back and watch your kid, and if you find that they become so focused and concentrated when they're doing something with their hands, and they get so focused and concentrated on that, and that's more interesting to them than socializing with another kid, it's not that they're never gonna socialize with a kid. They just might want to do... They might wanna just do that activity that's stimulating their neurological system through that form of touch. They might be more interested in that now, and later they will develop their other skills about socializing and connecting and all of the rest.
**Unknown:** So as I said, this is really not about advising that you have a improper diagnosis. This is to be more thought-provoking and to be able to inspire you to look at your child in a different capacity and potentially do more hands-on activities with them and to help them expand their physicality, because that's equally as important as the intelligence. You know, how many kids can be really book-smart, but you throw them into the wilderness and there's no chance in hell they can survive? There's no chance in hell they can even run to outrun a squirrel, you know?
**Unknown:** I'm not even talking about a lion. You know, physicality was something that was always, always part of development for hundreds of years, and in this new, this modern age, it's something that's deemed to be irrelevant, not important, and it's all about your intelligence. And half of the intelligence that kids are gaining through the school system is not even applicable to creating a successful career or a successful life or even human interaction. You know, if your kid is someone who comes up when someone's stressed, regardless if they say it, and can just be nice to them or put their hand on them, that's a level of emotional intelligence that is extremely valuable as an adult.
**Unknown:** Kids that have the ability to tell stories, be animated, kids that have the ability to connect with others, kids that are able to touch something and understand it, kids that are able to create, kids that are able to see beyond what other people see, opposed to us saying like, "That's not important," or, "That's not how it works." It's listening to them. They might be more insightful than us. So that's, that's my story, is one of the biggest things about Italy has been changing the environment so as a family we are expanding ourselves in different ways. One of those ways is expanding our physicality, expanding our physical challenge, expanding our hands-on with nature, and it has been so beneficial for our neurological system, our nervous system, our stress levels, our child development, our family bonding, and so much more.
**Unknown:** So we really hope that this creates some inspiration and decreases stress around the idea that your kid is different, because that difference could be really their ultimate uniqueness that allows them to expand so much and bring so much more to the world. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of IntegrativeU Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support. We love your comments.
**Unknown:** Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
Related episodes
About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
Further reading
Listen and read the full episode →