*sigh* Why do people think their kids don't deserve to know their own diagnosis? When they won't tell their kids, it's a sort of betrayal... it implies that it's so horrible that it has to be avoided, instead of a neutral sort of fact that you take into account when you go through life. If I had any say about it, I'd make people tell their kids as soon as they could understand words.

I am glad he finally got told, though. At least there's that.

Quite a few kids will lose their labels; the last estimate I saw was 25% diagnosed at two lose it by twelve. It doesn't mean their brains have magically become identical to their peers'; just that they've learned enough that their autism is no longer diagnosable. Kids learn. Autistic ones, too. Sometimes they learn enough that they catch up with other kids in the areas where they were behind to begin with.

When something doesn't cause impairment, you can't diagnose anything: Thus, the "lost diagnosis". It's still important to know about it, though, because it usually means that you'll have a different learning style you can take advantage of, and because--like being an immigrant from a different country--you might want to learn about where you started out. The autism community actually includes people who identify as "cousins" or "BAP" (broader autism phenotype)--people who don't have autism, but are on the autistic side of normal; or who have a diagnosis that's related to autism in some way, like non-verbal learning disorder, ADHD, and synesthesia.