Discussing Autism

The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine has devoted their April issue to Autism Spectrum Disorders, and has included a study done at Vanderbilt that suggests that younger siblings of children on the autism spectrum “demonstrated weaker performance in non-verbal problem-solving, directing attention, understanding words, understanding phrases, gesture use and social-communicative interactions with parents, and had increased autism symptoms, relative to control siblings.”

After reading a synopsis of the study, I’m rethinking my career choice. I may be able to do more good as a research assistant than I can as a writer. It’s obvious that many of these studies need a cynical voice to chime in and say “Well, what about taking X into consideration?” because it sure isn’t being done now.

I have four children, and can tell you that children will imitate older siblings. It’s the way children work. We actually took child number three to the opthalamologist when he was two because he was walking around squinting all the time. Turns out he was imitating his older brother, who is nearsighted and has astigmatism, yet hates wearing his glasses. In the majority of family dynamics, you have younger siblings looking up to older siblings as a matter of course. If older sib is exhibiting “typical” autistic behaviors like hand flapping or lack of eye contact, why WOULDN’T you assume that the younger child would emulate that behavior? It points less to a genetic link than it does to simple sibling dynamics, in my mind.

I wonder sometimes if any of the researchers actually have children, much less children who might exhibit “abnormal” behavior in some ways. I’ve seen younger sibs imitate everything from speech impediments (like lisps) to repeated sensory seeking just because they’d seen another child do it. That sort of imitation is even more apparent in siblings, and it seems like that might be an explanation.

I’d fully have expected the results from this study, but it leaves no questions answered. What the researchers SHOULD have been looking at is how this imitation might impact younger siblings in the long run. Does an older sibling’s social impairment make a younger sibling of a child on the spectrum slower to catch up socially? Are some milestones just met later, but caught up by a certain point?