Blame the Parents for Autism
Remember this “new theory on the cause of autism” from the beginning of September: Older dads are more like to have autistic children”?
Or how about the theory that TV causes autism, which appeared in the middle of October, thanks to one of its authors, Professor Michael Waldman of the Johnson Graduate School of Management of Cornell University, making his paper available for downloading from his website?
Both theories are back as of today on the front page of the Science section of the New York Times and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. And both, implicitly and explicitly, cast blame on parents for causing a child to become autistic.
The February 27th New York Times notes that the fertility clock ticks for men as well as women. “Mounting evidence” from a number of research studies is cited: Older dads father children who are more likely to have “abnormalities” (like autism?) and are at risk for “certain rare birth defects.”
“It’s like a light-bulb factory,” said Dr. [Avi] Reichenberg, the author of the autism study [which analyzed data from a large Israeli military database to determine if there is “a correlation between paternal age and the incidence of autism and related disorders”]. “You can manufacture a billion light bulbs, but some fraction are going to be impaired. When you’re manufacturing something so frequently, in such large quantities, the chances of an error are very high.”
Skeptics say the studies find an association but do not prove a causal relationship between an older father’s genetic material and autism or schizophrenia, and note that other factors related to having an older father could be at play, including different parenthood styles. Another possibility is that the father’s own mental illness or autistic tendencies are responsible both for the late marriage and for the effect on the child.
The last statement—”the father’s own mental illness or autistic tendencies are responsible both for the late marriage and for the effect on the child”—seems to be using the following logic: (1) a man has certain mental health issues and/or even “autistic tendences”; (2) because of (1), this man ends up marrying late (it is implied that the man, having these “autistic tendencies,” may have difficulties with social interactions); (3) because the man marries late, his sperm count and level of testosterone decline; (4) ergo, he has an autistic child. What stands out to me is the connection between a man having mental health issues and/or “autistic tendences” and his marrying late: While such a connection is possible, there are many unexplained assumptions being made here that seem not so much “scientifically based” as simply speculative.
The Wall Street Journal article is entitled Is an Economist Qualified To Solve Puzzle of Autism?: Professor’s Hypothesis: Rainy Days and TV May Trigger Condition. It reviews Prof. Waldman’ “tv causes autism” theory and cites criticism about it (”‘The moment you start to use economics to study the cause of autism, I think you’ve crossed a boundary,” says Dr. Ami Klin of the Yale Child Study Center). Should economists, the Wall Street Journal, asks “delve into issues in education, politics, history and even epidemiology” and apply statistical methods that economists use in considering topics from science?
From what the Wall Street Journal says about how Prof. Waldman arrived at his hypothesis, I would venture to say “no.”
Prof. Waldman, a recognized expert in the field of applied microeconomics, doesn’t pretend to be an authority on autism. He became engrossed in the subject in the fall of 2003, when his 2-year-old son, David, was identified as having an autism-spectrum disorder. Hoping to eliminate any potential triggers, Prof. Waldman supplemented the recommended therapy with a sharp reduction in television watching. His son had started watching more TV in the summer before the diagnosis, after a baby sister was born.
Prof. Waldman says his son improved within six months and today has fully recovered — a surprising result, given that autism is typically a lifetime affliction. “When I saw the rapid progress, which was certainly not what anyone had been predicting, I became very curious as to whether television watching might have played a role in the onset of the disorder,” he says. He tried to get medical researchers interested in the idea, to no avail.
I have exchanged some email correspondence with Prof. Waldman and do not, of course, presume to be able to speak regarding his situation and family. From the Wall Street Journal’s account of how Prof. Waldman decided to have his son stop watching TV (which his son David had started watching more of “in the summer before the diagnosis, after a baby sister was born”), it seems that he suspected TV to be a “potential trigger” on the basis of his son’s autism diagnosis occurring after an increase in David’s watching of television—a correlation that can be compared to theories that vaccines cause autism: According to such theories, it must be more than a coincidence that an 18-month old child is not talking, not having certain kinds of social interactions and play skills—that this 18-month-old child is showing signs of autism— and that 18-month-year-old’s receiving his or her vaccines.
A correlation that Prof. Waldman does not make is that between his son’s starting therapy (what type is not specified) and his son’s improvements in the next six months. Prof. Waldman also says that his son has “fully recovered” from autism, though what exactly his son is now like is not mentioned.
The notion that just turning off the TV can prevent the onset of autism is, as Dr. Klin notes, a “fad” and an insidious one at that. It is not that I am in favor of having children watch TV—-as it is, my son Charlie does not watch any by preference—but that Prof. Waldman’s hypothesis implicitly casts blame on the parents of autistic children. Who, after all, turned on the TV for a young child and plopped her or him down in front of it, but a parent in search of an electronic babysitter? The blaming of parents suggested in Prof. Waldman’s theory is more broadly described in a quotation from Anna Baumgaertel, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia:
Some experts think that in reaction to the discredited theories [of the bad parenting causing autism] the pendulum has swung too far away from the family. “The discussion of the role of the family, and social interaction within the family, is virtually taboo,” says Anna Baumgaertel…….. She says some of her autistic patients have been heavy video and TV watchers since birth — a factor she thinks “may lead to autistic behavior in susceptible children, because it interferes with the development of ‘live’ auditory, visual, and social experience.”
Is Bruno Bettelheim’s notion of the “refrigerator mother” being brought back to life as that of “TV parents”—- and all the more when one of those parents (say the father), being “older,” cannot get off the couch and play and interact with his child, who is therefore at risk of becoming autistic? Is it being suggested that a parent’s mental condition might cause autism?
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POSTED IN: Genetics, Health, Parenting, Science, Stereotypes
18 opinions for Blame the Parents for Autism
Lisa/Jedi
Feb 27, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Interestingly, one of the suggestions Brendan’s well-respected & skilled child psychologist gave us to assist him with social interaction was to watch videos. :) Specifically, he recommended Charlie Chaplin & the Marx Brothers’ films because of the exaggerated, mime-type acting of Chaplin & Harpo Marx. As a family we’ve come to adore these movies (& he’s getting a set of Marx Bros. films on dvd for his birthday-shhh! Don’t tell!). I have also seen some videos engage Brendan’s imagination in wonderful ways (we are very selective as to what he watches) & it is Miyazaki’s film “My Neighbour Totoro” (#1 on the AMA’s list of least-violent children’s movies) that originally sparked his interest in Japan, which has led to our planned trip to Japan this June. “Nuff said?
Joseph
Feb 27, 2007 at 4:34 pm
It’s actually a bit funny how the TV hypothesis got started: the same way most others do. A parent tries something based on a hunch. The child has developmental progress to the point where the parent can believe (perhaps through some mental gymnastics) that the child is “recovered”. Then they try to prove the hypothesis. In this case, Waldman even has skills that allow him to come up with some fairly sophisticated and convincing epidemiology (which nevertheless I believe is very much confounded by certain variables).
If they are doing double-blind studies on chelation, I guess I don’t see the problem in someone doing randomized studies on TV restriction.
The old dads finding is pretty solid, though, and it makes scientific sense. However, there are some pople who are claiming that advancing father age can explain the rise in administrative caseloads. I think they are wrong. Average father age has not increased that much in the last decade or two.
Club 166
Feb 27, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Cell phones cause autism. Combined with french fries, of course.
If you track the rate of rise of parental use of cell phones with the rate of rise of autism, you see that they track together very nicely. Obviously the RFI from the cell phones is inducing a change in the man’s sperm (either that or the cell phone use is causing mom to ignore her kid).
And if you look at when kids start eating french fries and when they start developing symptoms, you’ll see that soon after they start eating french fries they start exhibiting autistic symptoms.
I think I have a paper here. :o
Joseph
Feb 27, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Ah, but the key piece of data is that the Amish have neither french fries nor cell phones.
Club 166
Feb 27, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Ah, but the key piece of data is that the Amish have neither french fries nor cell phones.
Quite right.
And we haven’t heard as much about autism in China or other parts of Asia, either. It would seem that you need both cell phones as well as french fries.
You can be second author.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 27, 2007 at 6:33 pm
So maybe our children ought all to be eating white rice……or we could try to correlate the growth of McDonalds in China with a hypothesized rise in autism…….
Bernie318
Feb 27, 2007 at 6:54 pm
I read the “TV causes autism” paper. Such a huge, flawed assumption, that something “triggered” the autism before the age of three. He doesn’t even mention the possibility of genetic causes. When my daughter was born, she didn’t cry. I knew something was very different about her when she was months old. She’d never check to see if I was there (the refrigerator mom)… she never had stranger anxiety, etc. She never pointed at things. Of course all this was before we even had a TV set, let alone cable. Anyway, my own personal theory:
Aspergery mom with long line of ASD in the family plus ADD dad=autism.
Autism Vox » There Are Some Things You Just Can’t Fake
Feb 27, 2007 at 8:22 pm
[…] It seems that one should only be subjected to one spurious explanation for autism per day. Alas, here is yet one more: […]
Ms. Clark
Feb 27, 2007 at 9:21 pm
I just want to throw in here that the word “blame” is a loaded one.
It’s quite likely that an autistic man would marry late (if he marries at all) and produce an ASD child (if he has kids at all). It’s quite likely that an autistic man would marry a woman from another country after realizing that women of his own country aren’t interested in him (foreign people in general tend to put down whatever weirdness in the ASD person to a cultural difference, so an ASD man from Zimbabwe might marry a “foreign” woman from the USA and she’d likely be more inclined to overlook his oddness and think it was a “Zimbabwean thing.”)
So far the CHARGE study is showing that college educated women are more likely to have ASD kids. Simon Baron-Cohen shows that people of certain professions (math and science) are more likely to have ASD kids than more liberal arts kinds of professions (I think he compared people the math/science guys to journalism guys).
Women who are older are more likely to have complications around childbirth and childbirth complications are correlated with ASD. Women who take a drug to prevent a premature delivery (probably moms of twins and triplets more often than not) are more likely to have ASD kids. Moms who drink alcohol and take drugs are more likely to have a child dx’d (possibly improperly) as an ASD kid.
Where’s the blame? Is it “blame” if I say that an older man married to a well-educated older, foreign woman (who drank a little wine with meals through her pregnancy and took meds to prevent a premature delivery) and ended up with an autistic child actually DID things that contributed to their child being autistic? Yes, they did things like marrying older and marrying a person on the spectrum that increased the odds of their having an ASD child.
Saying that person X has such and such genes that contributed to their child being more likely to have an ASD kid is not blame.
I don’t think it’s blame at all. There’s too much defensiveness going on around discussions of autism causation, I think.
The mercury parents drape themselves in all this purity and say, “they are just trying to shift the blame from thimerosal to the parents, it’s Bettleheim all over again.” That’s just nonsense.
People DO have “defective” genes that they are not aware of when they decide to have kids. Everyone has defective genes, everyone is carrying disease genes. The parents are always to blame, are always responsible for, in some sense for their child’s autism, just not in the sense of Bettleheim and the mom having a deep seated wish to kill her own child. It’s riduculous to hold the parents “blameless” or entirely unconnected to their child’s autism. jypsy says if she could take “credit” for Alex’s autism she would, gladly.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 27, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Just wanted to note: Jim and I are both professors, of the humanities—of American history and of classical literature and languages.
I had Charlie when I was 28 years old when I had Charlie. No alcohol, drugs, or drugs to prevent a premature pregnancy (Charlie was full-term).
But I would say, I think that there was autism in the family, before Charlie.
Leila
Feb 27, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Professor Waldman: watching too much TV is not a cause, it is - I’d dare say - a SYMPTOM of autism. The kid is watching too many videos because he doesn’t have many playskills, and he loves the visual stimulation. Plus, TV is easy for him because it doesn’t require human interaction.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 27, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Also wanted to thank you, Ms Clark, for highlighting how loaded “blame” is.
And I do think too much time and digital ink is spilled on “causation”—-and is never enough time as it is to enjoy being with Charlie.
Susan Etlinger
Feb 28, 2007 at 1:02 am
Thank you for this thorough analysis. I agree that too much time and ink is spent on “causation”–though I would love to see some credible research that provides more insight than we have now so that parents to be can stop obsessing and at least have a decent sense of what lies ahead. This whole issue is so fraught with fear and blame and urban legend that it in itself seems pathological…so where do we go? Love our kids, take care of them, enjoy them, live and learn. Anything else seems like madness.
Jez Rourke
Feb 28, 2007 at 3:02 am
There have always been older fathers older mothers, older sisters older brothers….. I mean it’s not like there are picture perfect families where everything happens at the right age, right time. Plan as we may for our futures, our plans don’t necessarily fall into place. I mean don’t you all remember being in grade school and some kids having parents who seemed ancient? It seems silly that suddenly age would be implicated. For the most part I think while our reproductive organs work, they do so because we can have children.
What always strikes me is sometimes I look at my daughter and I look at my husband and just have to say out loud: how could the two of us, the most ordinary people in the world have created such a beautiful extraordinary child? That truly mystifies me.
mumkeepingsane
Feb 28, 2007 at 10:35 am
My husband was 25 when we had Patrick. Actually all the autistic children I know have fathers under the age of 30.
I think it’s jarred babyfood. All those pesticides in concentrated amounts fed to the child every day for months. (IMO, this is no further out there than the vaccine theory or the tv theory).
Seriously though, of course it somehow leads back to the parents. Genetics, behaviour, exposures to certain substances (I’m thinking the parents exposure, not the kids)….it really could be anything or any combination of things couldn’t it? I think it can only be called blame when the intention of the parents is in question.
I honestly don’t think all autism is caused by the same thing. There seem to be so many different “kinds” of autism out there. It looks like a bunch of different autisms…some genetic, some caused by other things, and if they all have the same basic symptoms then they’re lumped into the Autism umbrella.
My son was different from birth. There was no regression. His progress just seemed to slow over time. I dunno, the cause just doesn’t seem all that important to me anymore.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 28, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I fed Charlie very little jarred babyfood as most of it ended up on the floor…….. Charlie was definitely different from birth, too.
Julia
Mar 4, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Pregnancies went well.
Complications at childbirth for all of mine, though. C. least of all. S. had to undergo “vacuum extraction” and then had jaundice. C. and T. were twins, with all that implies (although I carried them long enough to avoid the NICU).
2 grandfathers probably both with AS has something to do with it, I think! :)
Phil Schwarz
Mar 4, 2007 at 10:48 pm
As for causation, correlation, and all them twenty-five-cent c-words:
*Everyone* knows that global warming is due to the decline in the number of pirates in the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
Arrrrrrrr!
– Phil,
AS father of an autistic son and a daughter in the broader phenotype,
Son of a professor emeritus of English who was hyperlexic as a child,
Grandson of a merchant who had arithmetic savant skills, and
Married to a charming non-autistic woman whose father was profoundly non-autistic but who had autistic cousins in his mother’s family
You pass the “hidden horde”, or their relatives, on the street every day.
Let’s agree that there are 1 in 150, *however we got to this point*, and get busy arranging the support and accommodations they will need, and removing the obstacles in their way, as they attempt to live maximally enabled lives in this world of ours.
We aren’t going to drown, and we aren’t going to go bankrupt doing so.
Get used to the world becoming ever so slightly more autistic on average.
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