A few days ago, I emerged from my office after squandering a few hours on the Internet and took a quick attendance of family members. I think that if you're a parent, you never stop counting bodies.
Steve was sitting in the comfy chair by the window reading a book about Napoleon. I found Jonah in his room drawing pictures of large eyed Japanese people. I shouted for Ian. No answer. I checked his bedroom, the bathrooms, the TV room. I ran around the outside of the house. No Ian.
We've lost Ian before, and it wasn't good. Other parents may count their children, but autistic parents do it with a different level of urgency. So, I panicked. I yelled at Steve. "IAN'S GONE." Steve threw on his shoes and ran out of the house.
We were very close to a busy road at our old house, so the boys had a very small zone in front of the house where they were allowed to ride their bikes. They kept to that zone like there was an invisible electric fence keeping them in.
Here, the boys may have too much room to roam. We live right next to a large circle of houses. The only people who drive on that road are the homeowners and their landscapers. We decided that it was okay for Ian to ride his bike around the circle without a grown-up watching him. There is also a repurposed elementary school down the block from us with a large soccer field and a municipal tennis court. We let Ian go down to the school one time to meet up with Jonah. Now, Ian thinks that he can go to the school by himself.
Steve found Ian at the soccer field picking dandelions for me. He came up to the house with a bouquet and said "Here you go!" with such a big smile on his face. We couldn't be too mad that he hadn't told us where he was going.
He's going to be ten next week. Other 10-year olds can ride their bikes on their own far and wide, but we can't let Ian do it. He such a perfect prey for perverts. With all that ABA therapy, he's been trained to do whatever a grown up says. I still worry like crazy when he goes to the men's room at malls and other public places. When he's in a public restroom, I stand outside the door tapping my feet and checking out the faces of all the guys who go in. Are you a pervert? Are you a pervert? OK, they probably think that I'm a creep, but whatever.
In the past few weeks, I've read amazing articles about autism I should probably create new posts for all the topics, but I'm in a rush today. The kids are off from school, so we need to keep them occupied. We're thinking about visiting the Empire State Building this morning. In the afternoon, Jonah has to get his second round of braces. Another $2,000. Ugh. So, this is going to be one mongo-autism-link post.
USA Today talks about the research on autistic brains. They look a lot like regular brains, but the wiring between the sections of the brains is different. The good news is that brains can get rewired. I know that. One quibble though. USA Today contrasts autistic kids with "healthy" kids. Autism is not the flu.
Amy Harmon writes about Autism Wars.
Two new studies have come out about the causes of autism. One study points to obese parents. I haven't had a chance to read the actual study yet, so I shouldn't comment. But I will. Parental obesity could be related to low muscle tone and poor physical coordination often goes along with autism; the parents may be slightly autistic themselves. So obesity didn't cause the autism. It is a symptom of a genetic trait. (And I weighed 110 pounds at 5'5" when I got pregnant with Ian.)
Another study looked at the very small sample of autistic kids who have no autistic-type genes in the extended family. Sometimes men create genetic mutations when they get older. But there are hundreds of different genetic mutations that can cause autism . This finding confirms what we pretty much know – autism isn't really one thing. (Am really, really rushing. No time for links.)
Apt. 11d 
“One study points to obese parents. I haven’t had a chance to read the actual study yet, so I shouldn’t comment. But I will. Parental obesity could be related to low muscle tone and poor physical coordination that comes from the parents themselves having autism. And I weighed 110 pounds at 5’5″ when I got pregnant with Ian.”
I didn’t think of the muscle tone/coordination thing. That’s clever.
Anecdotally, I think I’m the only fat mother of an autism spectrum child that I know. Practically every mother of an autistic child I’ve ever met or seen a photo of is slim and/or fit, so the obesity/autism finding is kind of counter-intuitive for me. (Probably some class component, there, though–my acquaintances and the bloggers I know are predominantly upper middle class.)
I’d add to Laura’s argument by mentioning that in my family (which has lots of people with little bits and pieces of autistic behavior and personality), you see a lot of people with drinking habits, at least one gambling habit, several caffeine fiends, and at least one person with a serious cookie habit (me). I’d suggest that all of these habits are 1) self-medicating/self-regulating/self-soothing techniques and 2) that people with autistic personality features are very prone to overdoing things, which might mean falling more readily into addiction.
In the case of Bettelheim’s refrigerator mother, the correlation between emotionally cool mothers and autistic children was misunderstood–at the time, they didn’t understand that the cool mothers shared the autistic features of their children, just to a lesser degree. The compulsively cookie-eating mother with a child who compulsively does other stuff may be the same deal–the compulsive cookie-eating may just be a weaker manifestation of an autistic trait.
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Don’t know if this is a really good idea or a really bad idea, but we got our 10-year-old a cell phone with texting, and it has greatly improved our lives. Would that work better for a boy who does better with written instructions?
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Here are a few more thoughts.
1. With autism, there’s no “off” button. The tendency is to start an activity and then keep going until it’s done. Obviously, this has an upside (total dedication to project), but the same tendency to see things through to the end applies equally well to a pan of brownies or a bottle of whiskey.
2. With changes in social norms, eating is one of the last vices that is socially acceptable. (Being fat isn’t, but the stuff you do to get fat is totally acceptable.) In the good old days, a lot of the mothers who are fat today would have been chain smokers. These days, social norms aside, that would be a ridiculously expensive habit in many states.
3. Laura mentions the possibility that there are different kinds of autism. Maybe there is a special obesity-triggered autism. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the wild, though.
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The texting has been good for us, with our eleven year old. The phone was acquired after we lost her at a major airport. She found our way back to us, and I was surprisingly confident that she would (while my husband was freaking out). I think whether it helps for everyone (there’s a pretty big conflict in our parent population about whether the kids should have the phones or not, because parents worry 1) that the kids will use the phones to text all the time and avoid the present and 2) that the phones will allow kids to venture into situations that aren’t safe anyway).
I have a very mature 11 year old, and I still freak out about her being in parks, malls, stores and other public places without my eye on her. When I let her and a friend walk home this summer from about 1/2 mile away, I made her text me at intervals. I was pretty sure this wasn’t necessary, but I couldn’t help myself.
We were at an audition the other day when the guy routing the kids turned to one of them and said “OK, here’s your name tag, take your top off and go into the room to join the group.” He meant take her sweatshirt off, but all my radar got raised; it seem so easy for that interaction to go awry.
It’s a process, learning to calm ourselves down even when the kids are neurotypical. And, I think this is the time when we have to learn to do it, and figure out what is protecting them and what is over-protection.
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The obesity study is an epidemeological correlation study, and thus is vulnerable to the standard complaint about correlations: that correlation is not causation. Nothing in the study teases out causation, so hypotheses about obesity/gestational diabetes/hypertension and autism in the children being related to an underlying cause, rather than directly related to one another is perfectly plausible.
The study also has the post-hoc diagnosis worry (the reason why the breast cancer/abortion link is false — people who had breast cancer were more likely to remember/report abortions than people who didn’t have breast cancer). With autism, too, parents might remember things pregnancy diagnoses when their child has autism. The authors said they tried to avoid this confound by looking at medical records (good) and using a structured survey (which might work; I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if that fixes the problem of flawed memories).
Finally, the obesity work is from a group that is looking hard for “environmental” causes (which includes anything that influences the environment, including the obesity of the gestating parent, chemical consumed by the parent, environment in the womb, . . . .). The same group reported that there has been a non-diagnosis related increase in autism in CA, and is focused on finding possible causes of the increase they believe has occurred. I don’t think the work should be dismissed, but it should be considered with all the caveats.
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I know that feeling. Boy, do I know it. In this house, it’s impossible to open an exterior door without someone hearing and pretty much any route Youngest would take to get to an exterior door takes her past one of us. That’s better than in the old house!
The coverage of the research on obesity in pregnant mothers and autism in their children troubles me. Already I’m seeing prescriptive and problematic comments that boil down to “blame the mom” when the study is still so preliminary that you can’t take any clear analysis from it.
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Janice – I feel like every study that talks about the causes of autism involves blaming the mother. Either it’s our bad genes or we’re too fat or we chose to live in a polluted area. I really hate reading any research about the causes of autism. I much prefer research on the brain of autistic children and how it does cool stuff and how it can repair itself. The cause research is just one big bummer and is written in such an offensive manner that I often wonder if the scientists who wrote the study were themselves lacking critical social abilities.
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“Janice – I feel like every study that talks about the causes of autism involves blaming the mother. Either it’s our bad genes or we’re too fat or we chose to live in a polluted area.”
How about the paternal age stuff?
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I hear you, Laura. The only thing that makes me feel better is that I know damn well my FIL was autistic. I like to think the giftedness part of his 2E diagnosis came from me. 🙂
I’m actually also interested in the connections between autism and allergies/reactive airways. Right now, E walks around sounding like Harvey Fierstein and puffing on his inhaler like he’s the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. There’s got to be some connection between his respiratory sensitivities and all the other sensory sensitivity.
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