If you watch an autistic child watching TV……
October 17, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
The study by Cornell researchers (in the Johnson School of Business) about a possible link between autism and TV has been reported everywhere across the internet, from here at Digital Silence to here at Occupational Health and Safety.
Professor Michael Waldman’s hypothesis about TV possibly causing autism is certainly provocative. The study draws on statistics and data from sources ranging from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey to county-level autism data for California, Oregon, and Washington to percentages of households that subscribe to cable television—but not on actual observations of autistic children watching TV. On First it was iPods, now it’s TV: Blaming autism on electronic appliances, my post about the Cornell study, I made these observations about autistic children watching TV:
While Waldman’s study gathers together and compares the results of a number of studies on autism, media, the effects of those media on children, and so forth, the study does not take into account some of the particularities, or peculiarities if one prefers to phrase it that way, of autistic children “watching” television. TV “watching” for some autistic children is a perhaps a sort of sensory experience in which children interface with a machine producing sound and numerous visual stimuli. Autistic children may have a hard time sitting down and sitting still to watch a TV show; in the case of my son, he gets up frequently and often ends up pacing the room while occasionally glancing (through the corners of his eyes) at a TV set.
Watching TV for an autistic child may be a neurologically different experience than it is for those of us who are not autistic, and (as far as I can tell) this sort of “non-NT” experience of watching TV does not seem to be in Waldman’s article. It would be interesting to learn about any observations he and his research team have regarding the actual experience of an autistic child watching TV.
I am angry that the media report conference presentation studies and poster sessions, whether it is the presence of measles vaccine in a few kids’ guts (which means nothing in the absence of a theory) and or this new, unpublished but clever paper.
This is just the kind of study one should find at professional conferences, where scholars are free to explore even the most radical or zany ideas and get feedback from their colleagues. But it is not a study the media should celebrate. For one thing, this is not a study that would be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed journal, and few universities would consider sending a press release about it. The unpublished study, simply a clever exercise in correlation and methodology, is itself based on unreliable and unpublished data such as numbers of children classified by their state under the diagnosis of autism, and a conversation between UPI reported Dan Olmsted and a pediatrician from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who told Olmsted he hadn’t seen many autism cases in his career.
Parents like me who have a child with autism rush to read anything new. The media exploit our situation and make us even more panicked than we already are.
Hmmm…I wonder what these folks would say if they watched my teen with Asperger’s “watch” tv? He’s also visually impaired — he can’t see the television!
Look at the background of the Nicholson guy. He does research to support DRUG Development.
I would like to find out how and why Professors Waldman, Nicholson and Adilove (who studied electricity markets) decided to study autism in the first place.
Yeah….that is a very strange team of people to put together to “study” autism…..
Moi smells a rat. Want to do some snooping with me? I’m game. I’m really tired of people trying to take advantage of the public.
I discussed this on my blog, which addresses behavioral treatment issues in general, with a focus on developmental disabilities.
Before we even get to your excellent point about television watching being a different experience for a person with autism (a conversation I had today with a friend who also has a son with autism), we can pretty much toss the study out because:
-It includes no direct measurement of the children in question
-It does not account for the differences in population centers related to the areas upon which it focuses.
-It takes great leaps of faith in extrapolating information about one group and applying it to another.
-The authors make the beginning statistics student mistake of trying to use a correlation to imply a cause. In opinion the repeated use of the word “trigger” in reference to the role of television in their correlational analysis is simply irresponsible.
I agree with the comments above – this looks like a blatant attempt to gain professional attention based upon the general interest in autism.
I’m glad to see other voices interested in autism addressing this as well.
I talk about these points in more detail at:
http://www.fcbd.org/Behaviorally%20Speaking/Behaviorally%20Speaking.html
If anyone is interested – that article is listed on Digg as well.
You obviously didn’t read the study. It is showing the effects on those children under the age of 3. Obviously your child with autism is older than that age, and not too many people can say their infant child is pacing the hallways. I would be willing to wager that 90 percent of all autism is caused by bad parenting. But you can continue to hide the facts if you wish.
@Jon, thank you; your comment recalls outdated theories of autism as caused by “refrigerator mothers.” The study was posted online by Professor Waldman and was therefore able to be read.
Kristina, you’re going to have to start buying the troll kibble in the economy size.
“…An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion. “
Wikipedia, Troll (internet)
See also: Do not feed the trolls (DNFTT), concern troll, sock puppet, baiting. gadfly, schadenfreude.