Girls living with autism are often misdiagnosed, misunderstood or missed completely, says a group formed to support girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Officially, boys outnumber girls with ASD four to one, but experts say that figure is misleading.

"[Autism] is much tougher to spot in the girls," said Danuta Bulhak-Paterson, a clinical psychologist who wrote a book about girls living with autism, Aspie Girl.

"They have a very different presentation to boys on the spectrum."

Boys living with ASD will often be quickly diagnosed based on telltale signs, such as difficulty socialising and communicating, and repetitive and inflexible behaviour.

Girls are often able to mask these symptoms.

"They often give good eye contact," said Ms Bulhak-Paterson.

"They're far better at imitating and often observe before they have a go. So they're real chameleons."

Katie Koullas knows all too well how hard it can be for girls to be properly diagnosed. Both her daughters, eight-year-old Kikki and six-year-old Mia, have now been diagnosed as having ASD level one — also referred to as Asperger's syndrome.

Girls with ASD can be intensely shy. For Kikki, it made school tough going.

"Yeah, it was very hard," Kikki said. "It took me a year to make one friend."

Ms Koullas struggled for years to have Mia diagnosed.

"We were looking for three years for answers to explain the possible concerns we were having," she said.

"I went to probably 10 different doctors over the two or three years. Not one mentioned the word autism or Asperger's."

Ms Koullas is the founder of Yellow Ladybugs, a group that supports girls with ASD.

On World Autism Awareness Day, April 2, they have planned events to help raise awareness of girls living with autism and the fact that ASD is often initially missed in girls.

"It's so important because girls are getting diagnosed later in age than boys," she said.

"So they miss out on the critical early intervention funding."

Professionals said 'she's just shy'

Natalie Galvin also knows how hard it can be to identify autism in girls. Her six-year-old son Nathan was diagnosed with ASD relatively quickly. But that was not the case for her eight-year-old daughter Emma.

"With Emma, we noticed from a young age the symptoms were there, just not as intense," she said.

"Every time we approached a professional to talk about it, it was always dismissed as she's just shy. Or she'll be fine."

Emma had repetitive behaviours and an overwhelming fear of people.

She was eventually diagnosed with ASD.

"It was just such a sense of relief," said Ms Galvin.

"To have actually finally got that diagnosis and understand what's going on now."

'It was easy to work out life from there'

The relief of a proper diagnosis is something Chloe Hayden can relate to. The 18-year-old lives with ASD level one.

For her, there were years of social agony at school until she was diagnosed at age 13.

"Everything just fell into place. And it was so much easier to be able to figure everything out after that," she said.

"It was easy to just kind of work life out from there."

Ms Hayden is now an ambassador for Yellow Ladybugs, helping to support girls and young women who live with autism.

She runs a small performance business based on her passion for fairy tales, and also works as an actress.

Her message: Autism Spectrum Disorder does not define her.

"Everybody's different, and everybody has their own little quirks and traits," she said.

"I think it's really important that kids can see that autism isn't what makes them them. It's not a label which sticks itself onto you. It's just another part."

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Praxis is the ability of the brain to conceive of, organise,and carry out a sequence of unfamiliar actions.

An OT assessment may mention that your child has poor praxis or dyspraxia. Put simply, the therapist may have told you that your child has difficulties with motor planning (planning movements) but motor planning is only the tip of the iceberg.

Praxis is latin for ‘doing, acting’ but these two simple words do not give justice to the complex series of events that one’s body must coordinate in order to produce praxis. Praxis is the neurological process by which cognition directs motor action (Ayres, 1985). Put simply, it involves planning what to do and how to do it. In order to know what to do, we must first conceive the idea of what to do (ideation), then plan how we are going to do it (motor organisation, or motor planning), perform the movement correctly (execution) and then be able to reflect on feedback so we can adapt our movements in the future (feedback and adaptation).

Each of these four areas are quite complex within themselves. For example, in order to be able to plan or organise movements, we need to have a good sense of where our body is in space (body awareness), we need to have the cognitive ability to understand our actions and objects in the environment, we need to have good bilateral coordination in order to execute movements smoothly and we need problem solving skills to help us correct/ adapt our movements in the future.

But how would we know if our children are having difficulties with praxis?