Drinking Coffee Will Not Make Your Child Autistic
Heather Havrilesky writes about her fears of “impending motherhood” in Mommie Fearest in the October 2nd Salon. Among her fears for her “lamprey” (new born baby) is that she might imbibe something wrong and cause her baby to get……. autism.
My lamprey will whine and then explode into tears, but I’ll sally forth, determined to make it to the local coffee joint, even though I can’t actually drink any coffee, since I’m breast-feeding and the caffeine is sure to give my lamprey ADHD or autism or asthma.
I see the humor of Havrilesky’s mention of coffee as causing autism as meant to be tongue-in-cheek. However, I would suggest that she is engaging in some catastrophic thinking here and stirring up some catastrophic thoughts in other mothers-to-be and mothers, namely that they (mothers) could do something to cause their baby to have autism.
Mothers do not cause their children to become autistic. We do not know what causes autism, but it is not because coffee or some other substance was imbibed by the mother. To suggest that we mothers who are so unfortunate to have autistic children are to blame smacks of the outmoded, outdated, and just incorrect “refrigerator mother” theory of autism promulgated by Bruno Bettelheim.
And such misguided thinking is something to fear. Not autism.
Life with an autistic child like my son Charlie is very good. Life with autism can be simply beautiful, as more and more parents are writing today.
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POSTED IN: Diagnosis, Family, Health, Language, Parenting, Psychology, Rhetoric, Stereotypes
1 opinion for Drinking Coffee Will Not Make Your Child Autistic
Bonnie Sayers
May 11, 2008 at 7:45 pm
That is a funny one. I never touched coffee a day in my life. Although my Mom said when I was two I liked to eat coffee grinds. my first memory is at the age of three at a bakery in Plainfield, NJ watching them slice my cinnamon bread. I can still smell it. Luckily Sara Lee makes brown sugar cinnamon bread which is good and soon I need to make a run to the farmers market to get some pork roll. It has been almost a year since I got it last.
I never had tea either. I am a hot cocoa person.
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