by Dean Traylor

Created on: October 29, 2009   Last Updated: October 30, 2009

A five-year-old boy can't speak; instead, he grunts or screams when he wants something. Another boy, four-years old, can't touch a new object with his hands; he prefers to explore it with his foot. And then, there's the nine-year-old girl with the cognitive ability of a two-year-old who has panic attacks when given something new to learn at school.

Not every child with autism will have the same level of severity. For some, the symptoms are barely noticeable. For others, it is all too apparent. Abnormal responses to certain sensations, inability to communicate, and lack of empathy are a few things autism will cause. Sometimes, the condition is so debilitating that the student is rendered extremely developmentally delayed or nearly incapable of living and functioning independently.

The key to understanding the severity of autism that a child may have is based more on certain developmental milestones that have not been reached as they get older. Developmental milestones are a set of functional skills or age-specific tasks that most children can do at a certain age range (Boyse, 2009). When the child does not reach their developmental milestones at the expected times, the child is said to have a developmental delay. This does not refer to a child who is slightly or only temporarily lagging behind, according to Kyla Boyse R.N of Michigan Health System.

Often the time between a child's birth and the third year of his/her life is an important time for development. Skills such as gross motor, fine motor, language, cognitive, and social abilities start development during these critical years. Developmental delays often associated with autism will affect these areas.

Although research indicates children with autism are born with it, the symptoms usually are more noticeable at later ages. Sometimes, it's between six and 18 months of age when autistic conditions are noticeable. Milder forms of autism - or those that fall on the high end of the autism spectrum disorder - can go undetected for years. It's not unusual to have students diagnosed with classic autism, Asperger's syndrome or PDD-NOS (Persuasive Developmental Disorder not otherwise specified) in their pre-teen or early teenage years.

So what are these milestones? According to Advocates for Youth, an advocacy group for youth and sexual health, by their third year of age children start to develop language and communication skills, advance from using single words to phrases to complete sentence; begin to interact

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