Another post about ‘older dads and autistic children’
September 5, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
All day long I have been unable to escape from hearing about the “findings” regarding older dads being more likely to have autistic children. The story was in our local newspaper and posted on news site after news site on the Internet (as here, here, here and here in this article which began “Men who wait until after the age of 40 to father children are far more likely to have offspring with autism than those who have kids before the age of 30″ [my emphasis]). My husband Jim walked into the kitchen where his parents were eating breakfast and there was the TV set proclaiming:
Older dads more likely to have autistic children!
Jim recalled how we have also often heard that autism is more likely in a first son (and so, perhaps, in younger-aged parents?). I am no scientist, no statistician, no researcher (not about the prevalence of autism, for sure). I am an autism mother and so I wonder, How do these findings help Charlie?
I have been wondering all day.
All 3 of mine now have autism diagnoses from the school district, but there’s a lot more talk about future mainstreaming of the younger two than the oldest. (The twins are going to school now and liking it very much — she was sick on Tuesday and couldn’t go, and was very angry about not going when her twin brother did! And we’re seeing a difference in his behavior since he started school, all of it positive, which is nice.)
(Oh, and I haven’t been commenting for awhile because I had surgery 2 days after you posted this, was doing all sorts of prep before then and didn’t get around to trying to get caught up on this particular blog until today. My recovery is going as well as can be expected, but I won’t be 100% for at least another month. All the damage that was done to my body from carrying twins to 38 weeks got repaired, finally.)
And this comment is because I forgot to check the box for getting follow-up comments via e-mail.