Also a mother with child on the spectrum. Primary caregiver (is it grandmother?) should be pushing the care team hard. It is entirely possible to get a care team that is not well trained. Parental advocacy does not stop at getting the diagnosis. The parent must be there every step of the way to make sure that what needs to get done is getting done. If he or she has questions, they should be asking them. If they want different people involved, they need to go out and find them. Unfortunately, none of these things happen magically.
Note that I cannot tell from the posts whether the child is getting appropriate treatment or even who is responsible for him. Absolutely everything may be as it should be. My advice is therefore if there are any concerns the caregivers must ask questions and actively advocate for the child or nothing will change.
Six months is too soon to know anything, especially when he’s just two. My daughter didn’t say much of anything until she was almost five. She babbled and echoed some and she was not interested in people. If he was formally diagnosed they likely did more tests than “sounds like” on the internet.
My daughter got a full neuro workup so they’d have known if it was autism or some degenerative condition. I imagine it’s common to get this full testing. It took us over a year AFTER just a standard “developmental dely” diagnosis that got her in to therapies. ABA can be extremely taxing on a child with autism and they will, even with a good therapist, exhibit really unusual behavior (or “turning inward”) at first because it can be incredibly stressful. My daughter didn’t take very well to ABA so we didn’t push it after about a year. Honestly it seemed to make her anxiety issues much worse and I think it’s because they tried to suppress stimming. So she got speech and OT play therapy from age three but we saw very little improvement until she was around five, then she just blossomed as long as she was with adults. I don’t think she will ever successfully communicate with other children except the few in her social skills group therapy class.
At almost 12 she has a whole new set of frustrations but I guess they’ve got her trained to behave “properly” when it comes to social skills at least. She knows eye contact has value so she forces herself to do it, although it makes her horrifically uncomfortable. She tries really hard to be verbal, although it’s frustrating enough to cause shutdowns when she gets home. She has a lot of sensory issues. She has had her hearing checked many times over the years and she has no problems hearing, but processing what she hears is a major issue. Her worst problem is skin sensitivity. Wearing clothes causes the feeling of electric shocks. She does the skin brushing protocol every day twice a day and it’s helping, slightly. She can wear short sleeves and shorts and the cuffless socks and shoes as long as they are all two sizes too big. She can’t tolerate anything but cotton. No pants. It’s 30 degrees out and she has to wear shorts, a men’s size tee and absolutely no way in hell will she wear a bra despite being a D cup. She can’t wear skirts either because her legs rub together.
Just addressing this one point: it is totally plausible that you can tell by age 2 that something is up, even if it is mild. By my son’s 1st birthday party, there was no question that he was extremely different from his peers. He totally freaked out in the presence of other children (with adults, he was fine). In fact he spent the entire party sobbing, because - horror of horrors - there were OTHER CHILDREN around. He was also the clingiest child I’ve ever seen. When my friends’ kids were going through that stage where they dart off to explore the world at every opportunity (around 18-24 months), my son could invariably be found firmly attached to me. There were other signs, but those were the big ones.
(He has grown up to be fine, by the way - he is having a marvelous freshman year at college and is a fully functional, genuinely decent human being. Probably the only lasting concern I have as a parent is that both his gross and fine motor skills are below average and always have been, so he’s not the least interested in exercise, which is bad from a health perspective. )