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When Geeks Meet, Are They More Likely To Have Autistic Kids?
An anonymous reader writes "Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks scientists and engineers could be more likely to have a child with autism, an idea that is fairly common currency in Silicon Valley. But many researchers say the proof isn't there yet. From the article: 'Baron-Cohen proposes that systemizing ability can be inherited — and that in information-technology (IT) enclaves such as Silicon Valley, where hypersystemizers are more likely to meet, pair off and have children, the result is a higher incidence of autism. Back in 1997, for example, he concluded that fathers of children with autism were more than twice as likely to be engineers as were fathers of non-autistic children. But autism researchers ... found that fathers of children with autism were more likely to work in medicine, science and accountancy, as well as engineering, and less likely to have manual occupations. They suggested that these fathers were simply more likely to have reached a higher level of education. Baron-Cohen says that when he reanalysed the data and controlled for education level, he found that fathers of children with autism were still more likely to be engineers, although the difference was smaller.'"
I thought he just made films about annoying people..
Who else said, "wait, is that Ali G?"
Isn't this a dupe?
Wasn't it a terrible story the first time around?
Date a blonde.
jk
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
If it were true, that would imply that when geek guys meet geek girls, they get it on, instead of just looking awkwardly at each other.
I am officially gone from
Parents that are in better paid positions such as engineering ones are more likely to be able to afford to have their children properly diagnosed. Poor children with learning disabilities are just lumped into the "stupid poor kids" category.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I think this story has already been posted.
Uh? If the mechanisms and inheritance are better understood it can lead ways to alleviate or avoid the condition. As someone who's significant other is officially diagnosed Aspie and a software engineer I'd like to know my odds and all the ways I could mitigate the risks. I would be perfectly fine with another Aspie/high functioning autistic in the family, but the more severe end of the scale scares me profoundly.
I've met lots of geeks and don't have any children, autistic or otherwise. Am I doing it wrong?
If a kid was socially awkward, we just called them shy or socially awkward (or geek and dorkwad on the pejorative side). Now every kid who isn't happy all day and whistling zippidty-do-da out his ass 24-7 has some kind of disorder. Not to dismiss those who legitimately have real autism (and they are out there), but all this "My kid has autism spectrum disorder/Asperger's," etc. shit has gotten ridiculous. Between that and all these ADHD kids (we called that hyperactive or just "rebellious" when I was a kid), these kids are so doped-up that I'm amazed they can even walk upright. Christ, NOBODY took medication when I was in school (except for one diabetic kid we had). And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
Now get off my lawn!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
At a recent speaking engagement, Temple Grandin (who knows a thing or two about autism) said that Steve Jobs was definitely "an Aspy" and that there are many more in Silicon Valley but she won't use their names because they're still alive.
I've heard that older fathers are more likely to have kids with autism (think it was on the news), and isn't it more likely that a man with a lengthy education get kids later? And it maybe takes the nerdiest ones a bit longer to find a mate... (Like me)
So the guys claim is only backed by his own research while two other studies had opposite results. I think we shoudln't jump to any conclusions just yet.
And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
Yeah, that's because they all died when they ate their first peanut butter & jelly sandwich.
When geeks meet...
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
*wipes tear away from eye* Oh deary me. That was a good one.
When I was a kid 24.679 years ago I had 4 kids in my 9am class with special needs, 2 in my 10 am class, 6 in my 11 am class, and 5 in my noon class. I had an average of 4.25 kids with special needs in my classes. There was only a 0.003% mention of incidence of autism on a daily sliding window basis but that didn't matter because we all got the same number of pencils, exactly 1 per week for the school year for 36 weeks of school, but on leap years we didn't get an extra 0.00555 pencils which I thought was wrong, nor did anyone take into account the total length of carbon trace each of us used or the exact pressure each of used pushed with.
When I was a kid we didn't have autism.
Yeah, that's because they all died when they ate their first peanut butter & jelly sandwich.
I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed that pattern long before the 90's.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Non-geeks should bang geeks so they can have kids who are just plain smart.
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Hahahaha, you actually made me LOL.
Thanks, I needed that.
... to give it it's proper name. Basically, people with similar behaviours end to seek out each others company. For example, heavy drinking smokers will probably find themselves at the bar or outside in smokers' alley. Similarly, ability to survive economically will determine where people can live. If some of these behaviours are genetically determined then they are also more likely to reproduce and so lead to a concentration of those genetic predispositions. But, and this is the bit but, there's a very thin thread between genes and complex behaviours, despite what you might read in the papers. There is a breathtaking array of interactions between, for example, genes and environment in producing behaviour and that are far from being properly inderstood that Baron-Cohen's thesis is, to put it mildly, overinterpreting the available evidence.
Used to be, when someone was acting weird, we thought they were possessed by a demon. Used to be people just died of "old age". Used to be, you could cure sickness with leeches.
Every once in a while, we learn something about the human body and brain that lets us understand it better.
Also, they don't medicate for autism/Asperger's. You believe a lot of crap.
Marry the cheerleader (football captain). That is all.
"When Geeks Meet, Are They More Likely To Have Autistic Kids?"
I've met about more than ten fellow geeks already this morning and the thought that by doing so I've made them more likely to have kids of any kind is kind of disturbing. I'm off to wash my hands...
Look -- there _has_ to be some downside to intelligence. Neuroses, depression, whatever. Otherwise, the entire human race would have self-selected for some higher intelligence level than IQavg=98 sd=15 .
There has been more than enough evolutionary time to estabilsh equilibria during the agriculture phase (5ky), probably also during the industrial phase (150y), but not yet enough during the info phase (50y).
And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
The predominant method of roasting peanuts changed in the 80's to a faster, higher-temperature process that changes the protein profile of the resulting peanut products. Most people don't seem to have a problem with this.
I don't know of a good study comparing the two (or how one could ethically design such a study).
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Mod parent up. There is no scientific data to his theory but it's a theory that's worthy of gathering new bits of scientific data.
Geeks are not more likely to have autistic kids.
- but there is a very high probability that they will have kids that are indistinguishable from autistic kids.
Engineer + engineer = autisim. Artist + artist = ADHD or bipolar or just plain nuts (my family.) Engineer + artist = gifted kid.
Too bad who you fall in love with has nothing to do with personality types or abilities.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
That's the conclusion, folks. Therefore, Julieanne Hough must dump Ryan Seacrest and date me. Julianne, call me.
From my experience, the more Conservative the family, the higher chance they will have an autistic kid. All of the people with autism that I have known came from very religious and conservative families. Of course, that is from my limited perspective in a conservative area of the country.
Agreed, and the reason why we have supposed "higher rate of autism" as engineers is that engineers usually realize they have no business trying to sort out emotional problems, they seek out professionals "who know better" by taking the misbehaving child to a psycologist, and the psych says "why yes, your child misbehaves, here are some drugs" and we dope the kid up.
The non engineering parents with the lower rates of autism usually don't bother with taking the child to the doctor because they don't see a need for it, they realize that kids will be kids and they use a modicum of discipline to address the behavior issue.
Most of today's autism issues are a simple case of "yeah, you're a child, you're not an adult and not capable of making adult decisions yet, so you still need to do what I say until you're legally an adult, then you can go and screw up your life as you see fit". Most parents today, especially those in a "professional" capacity, will rarely discpline their kids or even act like parents at all, most cases of autism I have dealt with are merely children acting out because the boundaries are not clearly defined by their parents and the parents not having any fucking clue what to do with the kids.
I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
It's a real thing. I have a cousin who runs a day care and she says that the number of kids she deals with who are allergic to peanuts has exploded from practically nothing in the last 5-10 years. She says if some of them even smell a peanut they could go into a coma.
Me and my friends ate tons of peanuts when we were kids, and never heard of peanut allergies...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
every single one of them if you pay attention to the internet.
The main problem with the research is the sample selection. He is comparing autistic SMART children against normal AVERAGE-Intelligence populations. No wonder the autistic kids seem smarter.That skewed selection is devastating if you wish to draw actual conclusions about autism and usefulness for intelligence.
For crying out loud. How many times do we see this? I think it has to do with more educated people being older when they have their first child and nothing to do with their personality.
most cases of autism I have dealt with are merely children acting out because the boundaries are not clearly defined by their parents and the parents not having any fucking clue what to do with the kids.
The Bullshit is strong in this one.
They really didnt separate them out from other slow learners. Now there is a chance you can develop targeted therapies then like iPad communicators shown on 60 Minutes.
Hasn't this been done to death?
Wow, that's an incredibly interesting fact. The only ethical way of doing such a study is to grab a large sample of people who are not known to have a peanut allergy. Then, when people in each group have a reaction, it's not your fault.
Data is on /.?
...that engineers are smarter than doctors. Well, we all knew that.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
First, there are more than one type of autism. And they may have different kind of causes and even multiple triggers. Second, in Asperger syndrome cases they found out that elevated levels of testosterone during pregnancy can cause Asperger, especially with male embryos.
Another aspect is, the more people look for a special dysfunction, the more they find. This is one cause why there are more autistic kids found in academic families then elsewhere. Especially mild cases of autism are not recognized by teachers and parents who have no diagnostic background or who do not search for typical symptoms.
Re: the peanut allergy: that was because in your day, they were all dead already.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Saying they could go into a coma is not the same thing as actually going into a coma. I'm sure there are kids (actually parents) that think they're allergic, but are exposed every day. My first grader brings peanut butter & jelly sandwiches to lunch weekly, as do many other kids. None of the kids are 'careful' not to wave their sandwiches around - hell they throw food like kids do. No one's ever had a coma, or any freaking reaction whatsoever.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
On the plus side, it could result in more software QA people.
Oh I knew lots of kids with other problems, (and grew up in the heyday of ADD overdiagnosis as well) but peanut allergies weren't one of them.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sauce? I expect you're correct, but do you have a source for the change-in-roasting-method claim? I think ethical design would be similar to allergy tests now. Small samples on skin of consenting adults and all.
Just as lawyers write up new laws to ensure themselves work, psychologists and psychiatrists do the same. Every personality quirk has been labeled as some sort of mental disorder. There isn't a person in the whole world who doesn't have a mental disorder by their definitions.
Basically their purpose in life is to get paid for writing prescriptions for liver-destroying medication in amounts that won't get jackbooted thugs to knock in your door.
Disclaimer: I was once foolish enough to seek their help. I ended up with more problems because they wouldn't let me forget certain events in my life which are better off being forgotten.
I can't condone studies that perpetuate a stereotype at the expense of a vulnerable group.
Quite
can you imagine the PC crowd if it read "when Muslims meet they are more likely to have terrorist children"?
When I was in elementary school in the late 80s/early 90s, there were usually 0-2 kids (out of 30-35) in my class each grade that had to take some kind of medicine for hyperactivity. At least one of them I remember specifically it was pretty clear when he hadn't taken his medicine that he literally couldn't sit still in his chair.
When I was a kid, I had so much energy that I could not sit still *at all*. I had to jump in place, *perpetually*, in order to stay in one spot long enough to receive a complete sentence of instruction. Not that it helped much...if a TV was playing in the next room the dialogue would grab my attention away halfway through what was being said.
When they diagnosed me with ADHD and put me on drugs, it was like magic. Overnight I became a functional, relatively normal kid. I also went from failing to being an A-student. I am not exaggerating.
While it is true that ADHD is a widely overused diagnosis, it is also true that authentic cases exist.
Incidentally, I don't need the drugs anymore. The doctor said that people can outgrow the disorder. I remember someone saying (don't remember if it was the doctor) that the drugs can "train" the nervous system to the point where they are no longer needed. I don't know if that is true or not. However, I do still have strange reactions to some common drugs. Like (nobody believes this until they see it) caffeine makes me tired. A cup of coffee will actually make me crash. I am told this is common among authentic ADHD cases, but I don't know if that is true.
As I told an earlier poster, I'm pretty sure a pattern of kids dropping dead after trying peanut butter for the first time would have been spotted *long* before the 90's. When a kid dies suddenly, doctors and medical examiners make a pretty major effort to find out why.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
When discussing the supposed link between autism and the Bay Area, perhaps people should consider that it is a giant pit of mercury. During the Gold Rush "quicksilver" mines sprung up everywhere, particularly in South Bay/Santa Clara (i.e., Silicon Valley). The mercury was also haplessly spread around in the gold mining process. To this day, there are signs all over the place---parks, hiking trails, creeks, etc.---warning of mercury contamination. But before modern regulations, Silicon Valley was a giant orchard, probably producing mercury-laden fruit, but who knows (no one was keeping track).
The link between mercury-stabilized vaccines and autism has been debunked, but mercury itself does cause all kinds of neurological disorders (mad as a hatter and all that), particularly in utero, and including autism. I am not suggesting that there is a link, only asking if anyone knows of any study that has posed the question or even taken it into account in studies about autism in the Bay Area. My anecdotal evidence suggests that people immediately jump to the "computer nerds are autistic" conclusion, without considering that there may be other, historical factors at work.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it."
Fuck you. You have never had a kid with an allergy. My daughter is allergic to tree nuts (not peanuts), and we had never even *HEARD* of the hysteria. All we knew is that she ate a piece of candy at Xmas and blew up like a balloon, including difficulty breathing. She was four.
Yeah, it was all made up hysteria. Go fuck yourself and die.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
We didn't have them when I was a kid, either, but that is a sad and unfortunate thing.
In decades and centuries past, many disorders were not understood, not diagnosed and just attributed to stupidity, or rebelliousness, or negative character traits. Those people just failed or succeeded as best they could on their own -- mostly they failed. In the case of allergies many of them just died.
These disorders are fundamentally no different from, say, presbyopia. They have a mixture of congenital and environmental causes, and they are debilitating to those who have them. Centuries ago, people who were near-sighted just had to suffer with their "weak eyes". Medical science now has multiple options to correct that defect, via prosthetics or surgical alterations. The same applies to these "newer" disorders, except that we're only beginning to understand them and how to treat them.
I have ADD, as do my three boys (one is also hyperactive; ADHD). Actually, they all have more severe forms of it than I do. I recognize in them the same difficulties I had in school when I was a kid... with the difference that they take medications which reduce the impact of their ADD making it far easier for them to excel in school. Those who think such kids are "drugged dull" don't know anything about it; most ADD medications are stimulants. In fact, I've realized that I self-medicate for my ADD, too, except that I do it with caffeine rather than Concerta.
An even better personal example is my daughter, who suffers from a mental illness that has only been recognized in the last couple of decades (and we now know is very poorly named): Borderline Personality Disorder. In the past, people would just have said she's a bitch (actually, lots of people say that today), but we now understand that it is actually a severe emotional disregulation disorder. On the surface it looks like extreme, random bitchiness, but when you understand the nature of the disorder you begin to see the patterns and to understand the reasons and the triggers -- and to have some compassion for the fact that as much as it sucks to be around her, it really, really sucks to be her. In fact, more than 25% of people diagnosed with BPD do not survive to age 30, mostly because they kill themselves (she's been hospitalized multiple times for attempts).
What makes this even more interesting is that as I look back in my family history it becomes clear that there have been others who suffered from BPD. They all led utterly miserable lives, and about half of them suicided. But no one understood what it was; they just thought it was a character defect.
Today, we are beginning to understand it, and beginning to realize that it's not particularly rare. Many of the extreme assholes you run into really are just sick... and there are some treatments that can help.
From a pure Darwinian perspective, you can argue that all of this medical intervention is a bad thing; that these people should just fail, or die. I disagree. Just as I appreciate the fact that I can wear glasses to address my presbyopia, and use caffeine to help me concentrate, I appreciate that we are learning to remove handicaps from many capable and brilliant people.
An experience that has cemented my perspective on this is getting to know many of the other girls in my daughter's treatment center. The treatment center handles teens with both behavioral health and substance abuse problems -- and actually it turns out that substance abuse is most often an attempt to self-medicate for an underlying mental or emotional health disorder. This was a 24-hour residential treatment facility, so all of the kids there were pretty hard cases; they ended up there after repeated behaviors that were deadly dangerous to themselves and/or others, or after major run-ins with the law or (usually) both. They were also mostly kids with pretty good parents.
What I was surprised to find after getting to know a lot of them was that they were also, almost wi
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SIDS is still a big mystery, but since they started restricting peanut allergens in schools, the rate has dropped by about half.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
the town i live in has a lot of "troubled youth" schools. i'm fairly familiar with the acting-up kid circuit.
http://g.co/maps/8vagy
that AC is actually right more than you know. the punks come in 2 kinds: the actual punks; and kids who've barely acted out (or even not at all) and their upwardly mobile parents didn't have the time/patience/interest to expend so they pay $$$ to have their kid locked up.
you could come see this first hand by working at any of the MANY fine establishments... there is such a massive market here because of the sheer number of California yuppies who have no idea what to do with their kids. it is an inconvenience to them, so they outsource.
i'm sure you won't change your opinion on this matter, but this is the truth.
THL phish sticks
Frustrated by their child's autism, the young couple turned to becoming geeks. Tragic, really.
Best to include a control group in your study that would expose subjects to the "old way" of roasting peanuts, whatever that is. Then we'd know for sure. :)
that's teh shizzle bizzle
You owe me a keyboard. Mine has coffee in it now.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
> And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
One could make the conclusion that life-threatening peanut allergies are more common than they used to be. Or you could go with massive media/scientific/medical conspiracy, because diagnosing someone whose airway has closed from anaphylaxis is, like, totally subjective.
Autism diagnosis is expensive and kids are usually screened for it first. The tests for screening contain questions like 'does the kid exhibit socially awkward behavior' or 'exhibit odd or repetitive behaviors', and similar traits that would be more associated with engineers and scientists than, say, people in marketing or HR. If there's more false positives due to the screening (I'd be positive, hopefully a false positive), and an evenly distributed number of false positives on the diagnosis, then it will follow that fathers of children with autism are more likely to be engineers. The statement was not 'engineers are more likely to have children with autism', and perhaps this subtlety is the explanation for the bias in their results.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
All this proves is that more parents are reporting to daycare providers that their children deathly allergic to peanuts. I've heard it before. The question is whether the incidents of children who are truly that allergic to peanuts (to the point of coma) has increased or parents whose children have mild peanut allergies have been led to believe they are OMGDEATHLYSERIOUS or at least tell other people it is that severe.
That was implied by saying "each group." I'm too lazy to expand my text beyond that.
I've only read two of his books, but yes, assortative mating has been a feature of his work going back to the 90's. I agree that his claims overshoot the evidence thus far, but I think he's onto something all the same. As you say, the linkage between genes and behavior is fraught with complexity, but there are a couple of mitigating factors in this case.
First, autism's hallmark is a lack of empathy/interest/understanding toward other people. While such behavior is obviously influenced by a myriad of genetic and environmental factors, it's not hard to imagine that a handful of genes could have a major impact on the overall system.
Second, it's easy to see "geekiness" as a mild form of this inability to "get" social cues and understand/empathize with others. And life experience clearly shows that "geeky" classmates tend to band together, simply because they are the only ones that can understand and cope with each other's awkward foibles.
Third, it's not hard to imagine a handful of genes that could predispose one toward greater interest or fascination with systems and structures. Nor is it hard to imagine that when two such people meet, they will tend to "hit it off" quite readily. In fact, due to previous experience with social awkwardness, a pairing like this may be MUCH more likely to result in offspring. So although these traits may be "fuzzy" and rare, they could nevertheless have a positive feedback bias when paired with others of a similar type.
Fourth, in the old days, such awkward/geeky people didn't get much chance to reproduce. But now in the internet age, they have a much greater chance of finding a partner, and are more likely to end up with a similarly geeky one.
Baron-Cohen doesn't claim that this is the only cause of autism, but it makes sense. And although we don't understand how it works yet, there does seem to be a statistical trend behind the theory.
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I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
We asked my kid's allergist about that once. He told us there were a few prevailing theories as to why food allergies have increased recently. One is that there were a bunch of really nasty viruses that went around about 100 years ago and the genetics that predisposed people to survive them may be related to the genetics for allergies. The other is that the average person now gets zero parasites in a year, where the normal used to be about 12 parasites a year for most people. Maybe a lack of parasites leads to our immune system incorrectly believing some food is bad. The stats certainly don't lie however, there are a lot more people with potentially lethal food allergies than there used to be.
They are more likely to have hypochondric kids? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose they are moke likely to have kids with hypochondric parents who do not have a clue what autism really is. Hint: It is not exactly the same as being afraid of girls or being too lazy to leave your mom's basement.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I can't believe you guys will listen to Ali G and Borat on neurology or genetics.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So what does acting up have to do with autism? I know an adult who has never spoken in his life, likes to sit on cars, play with his own feces, and can be cajoled into doing some basic household chores. He rarely acts up as long as you don't put him in strange situations. That's tip of the iceberg for dealing with someone with severe autism. Maybe some physician or psychologist is overdiagnosing some flavor of autism, but that strikes me as being unlikely.
When you speak of kids "acting up", I figure that's some flavor of attention deficit disorder, which I gather is routinely abused as a diagnosis and overmedicated.
It doesn't strike me that the original poster knows or for that matter, cares about the difference between these various mental handicaps. Instead they're just using terms of the field in order to troll for responses. Ask yourself this, would a sincere professional in this area write that engineers are more likely to dope their kids up?
What about the saying "opposites attract"? I mean, my wife is pretty much my exact opposite, and we complement each other quite well. I can't imagine living with someone just like myself.
Not too far off the truth - Simon Baron Cohen is Sacha Baron Cohen's cousin.
Life-threatening peanut allergies are really rare but are definitely real, and I think the pattern has been known long before the 90's - maybe not to you, but certainly to specialists. It's just public awareness has increased, as well as cultural willingness to make accommodations for such individuals (who previously either died or were forced into home-schooling to prevent exposure).
Wow, that's an incredibly interesting fact. The only ethical way of doing such a study is to grab a large sample of people who are not known to have a peanut allergy.
But aren't those people almost guaranteed to not have an allergy to either method of roasting? Everybody eats peanuts, right, unless they don't like them?
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Sauce?
I recommend the satay.
I expect you're correct, but do you have a source for the change-in-roasting-method claim?
This isn't exactly it, but perhaps in the discussion or references:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091674901535575
I don't quite recall the details - might have been that we used to fry more, and now do more dry-roasting, but I recall a temperature change as well.
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I know my colleague, who is running one of the UW autism research projects, is particularly interested in both maternal and paternal risk factors, as relates to scientist/engineer avocations.
However, one of our major problems to date is that all the IQ scoring systems have major problems of usage, and this makes it harder to get a high enough p value of significance in statistical correlations for the various traits.
At this point, it's too early to say that this is in fact true (statistically significant).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
are geeks able to produce autistic children by just "meeting"?
Of course they aren't, they need a petri dish.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
One other thing to note about peanut allergies is that, from a diagnosis/prevention standpoint, they are all treated as "Severe"
My son has a contact allergy to peanuts that causes a rash. it is not an anaphylaxis reaction, so, very much non-life-threatening. This being said, the allergist, and his pediatrician still prescribed epi-pens, and had the school treat it, for the purposes of preventing contact, as if it were a life-threatening anaphylaxis reaction.
my understanding of the reasons for this is 2-fold:
1) Peanut allergies, as a whole, are more likely to be life-threatening than many other food allergies.
2) Peanut allergies tend to increase over time, thus increasing the likelihood that his reaction could evolve into an anaphylaxis reaction after further exposures.
Now, we told the school that his treatment plan is "Diphenhydramine HCL (AKA Benedryl) & Observe, contact us"
The schools tend to treat all peanut allergies as life-threatening so that they can have uniform rules while dealing with hundreds of "Little smiling faces" rather than having to know "Johnny gets X, Bobby gets Y, Jane get Z... ad. nausium.)
I have no sources for either of the above, but those are my understandings
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Actually, the number of pirates is way up.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Fourth, in the old days, such awkward/geeky people didn't get much chance to reproduce.
I don't think this is true. I think in the old days such people were much more likely to reproduce with a partner who is more "normal", though, because it was harder to find a mate with similar characteristics. Instead, they just found someone who was less desirable in other ways. For example, uglier.
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was that peanuts or penis... i knew a lot of girls that had penis allergies.
Which is odd, given that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome affects children under the age of 1. Not too many of them are in school. If this factoid is true, seems like it's either a coincidence, or there's a another common factor at work.
Our son is 'socially awkward'... Through the end of grade 4, had trouble making friends, was bullied, and acting up in school. We always knew he was bright but just didn't understand why he was socially 'different'. As a parent, it breaks your heart to see your little boy want so much to have a friend or two but be rejected at every attempt; and then to come home with another bullying story... After a year of psych-ed assessments, talking to a pediatrician, and his GP, and doing a _lot_ of reading, we ended up with a diagnosis. Our son is classified within the school system as 'gifted' with some minor tendencies towards ASD. While it doesn't mean what you are probably thinking, it does provide an explanation for his behavior... He's not interested in the same things his peers in his neighborhood school were interested in... He was generally speaking/acting above his pay-grade, and monopolizing the conversation. He can't read visual cues, or subtle facial expressions. In school, he doesn't finish assignments because he can't come to grips with doing 3 pages of subtraction/addition largely because he's been doing it since he was 3. So he was bored, and acting out. I see a lot of myself in him... I did mediocre to poor at school because nobody paid attention to the fact that I just 'got' stuff and didn't need it hammered into my thick skull; I was bored and so turned into the class hyperactive clown... This served me ok in grade school but then I got to University and discovered that my lack of study skills, inability to take notes, and inability to understand how I needed to learn, caused me to need to abort my post-sceondary education...
My son is now in a school for gifted children. It doesn't mean they're teaching them nuclear physics in grade 5; it just means he has a slightly enriched program in the areas in which he is strong (language, verbal, written, research, math, music) but he is also being taught how his brain is wired and what he needs to do in order to use it effectively. After his first day at the new school, he came home excited because he'd made 6 new friends, and that he'd met "his people". He no longer has tummy aches and headaches every day (stress), and is now the happy child he should be.
So you might think this shit is ridiculous, but this diagnosis has led to a better understanding of our son, and has turned his life around. Both his mother and I had very similar school experiences, and we wish we'd had someone pay attention to what was going on in our brains...
You were probably the bully, weren't you?
Nah - they step into the bedroom and shout 'fork!'.
Over at EurekAlert is a summary of some new autism research. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uom-rra103111.php The summary says ... "Research reveals autistic individuals are in fact superior in multiple areas. Scientists must stop emphasizing autistics' shortcomings." This guy is saying that our society is diverse enough that there are niches for autistics to fill which fit their skills well. I'm not sure if he's saying that this is new because of how different our society is compared to our deep past. Maybe autistics would have been eaten or starved in the deep past.
Really rare? I know 3 people (my brother and 2 friends from high school) who would die in short order after eating a pbj without immediate medical intervention (within minutes).
In addition, they are white, south-Indian, and Filipino, so it's not like it's a genetic cluster or something. More common than you'd think.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
By school, I was including day care. Lots and lots are in daycare from 6 mos.
But yes, that is almost certainly coincident and not causal, and rather actually related to the 'back to sleep' campaign instead.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
Ah, the days before anti-bacterial soaps and overuse of antibiotics.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Most parents today, especially those in a "professional" capacity, will rarely discpline their kids or even act like parents at all, most cases of autism I have dealt with are merely children acting out because the boundaries are not clearly defined by their parents and the parents not having any fucking clue what to do with the kids.
Obviously, they don't spend enough time drinking moonshine and beating their kinds until they behave properly. You know what else works? Beating them until their grades improve! Put enough spikes in that paddle and they'll be getting a straight A average, damn betcha!! You can't beat them to be better looking though, my daddy damn near killed me trying, actually made me even uglier! But I is damn smart now, thanks to my beatings!
Are you depressed? Come here! I'll give you something to be depressed about! I'll whup that depression out of ya. You're autistic and won't talk? I'll get ya talking! You'll be screaming the ABCs when I'm done with you! I'll smack you around until you're a properly behaving genius like I is! You betch yah!
It's great to see that others out there appreciate the benefit that recognition of these issues has brought us.
I have personally experienced a lot of these things through my childhood as well, and it's a bit frustrating when others say these issues aren't real, etc.
As I am on the spectrum (aspergers), and also ADHD, I've consistently had issues maintaining jobs and personal organisation. A little help from others and some medication (prozac for anxiety problems, ritalin for focus) has made such a massive difference in my quality of life it's incredible.
Looking back at my family tree, I too see the issues sprinkled throughout, and with modern help those people would have lived happier, more productive lives.
Even now, aspergers is likely underdiagnosed (especially in women, because we're less likely to fit the aspie stereotypes) and ADHD is generally misunderstood.
ADHD doesn't always mean trouble makers; for many it just means it's too hard to stay focused, too easy to be distracted, or too difficult to be motivated to do things you *really* need to do.
If these things can be fixed with relatively minor medical intervention, then why wouldn't you?
Often I wouldn't even say ADHD and ASD issues are specifically negative, they have positives too (though severe autism is hard to deal with). The biggest issues tend to be around dealing with NT (neuro-typical) people.
I hope that in the future understanding of these differences increases and people stop with this "we didn't have that xx years ago" stuff. I'm glad these things are recognised now. Most people impacted by them are.
He said people rarely discipline their kids and your assumption was beating them. I discipline my kids in several ways that don't require physical, mental, or any other kind of abuse.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
If you think that treating neurological or psychiatric disorders in children is just a matter of discipline, then you're mistaken. Eventually you are going to realize it's not working and either admit that you were wrong and seek professional help for your children or you can get frustrated and start upping the discipline until you cause physical and/or mental damage. There are a lot of children with autism/depression/adhd/dyslexia that have ended up hurt and in the hospital because their parents were too incompetent to realize they were out of their league.
And how do you mistaken autism for "acting up"?
I guess I miss read either his post or yours. I was saying that discipline doesn't automatically equal abuse.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Disciplining a child with autism in way that doesn't take into account that the child has autism and doesn't understand that they did something wrong, is abuse. You should try to understand the nature of the problem and to do that you would have to acknowledge that autism is an actual neurological disorder, and not a "fad in personality disorders".
The poster was obviously an uneducated person who has little respect for "engineers", "psychologists", and 'professionals "who know better"'.
Looking at this quote.
The non engineering parents with the lower rates of autism usually don't bother with taking the child to the doctor because they don't see a need for it, they realize that kids will be kids and they use a modicum of discipline to address the behavior issue.
They make it clear that they think that "non-engineering" parents understand children better. They stated "they realize that kids will be kids", which implies that they think this is the obviously correct answer. Then they state that the solution was " a modicum of discipline to address the behavior issue." Now, keep in mind that we are not talking about your standard "temper tantrum" or "not wanting to go to bed" behavioral issues. This person obviously doesn't respect the existence of neurological disorders and thinks they are "made up disorders".
Do you think discipline can cure a neurological disorder?
Geeks who marry other geeks have higher probability of having autism kids.
Woman who give birth to child after 35 years old have higher probability having autism kids.
The truth: Having both situation means MUCH HIGHER probability of family stability and financial security. Engineers are paid more compare to other occupation, and woman who married late probably have established careers.
I would take family and financial security over the risk of having autism kid at any time.
Wonder why there is very few autism and ADHD in Asia? "Tiger-Mom" tactics are very effective on these children, that's why.
New Economic Perspectives
This is at least 2-year-old science. It might even have been 3 years ago I was reading this in a journal.
Thats what id like to know. I remember working a bounce ride at a childrens party in which an autistic child was in attendance. He got on the ride and would not come off when time was up. I tried to coax him off when his mother came to me and told me that her son had autism. She explained it as a sort of disconnection with the world, he was in his own little world and is unable to understand and socially interact normally with other people. So I just left him on the ride. He would just run around and bump into kids while laughing. As I sat down by the edge of the ride he would come around and just hug me. His mother was actually very surprised because he didn't interact like that with other people. He was all smiles and giggles, nothing bad about him. He just didn't listen because he didn't understand. Finally he tired out after 20 minutes and just curled up in the middle of the bounce ride while all the other children were jumping around. His mother had to go in and get him out. That is how I understand autism, a disconnection with the surrounding world.
Maybe to some that could be misinterpreted as acting out but in reality I understood that he wasn't aware of what he was doing. He was in his own world and did not understand what he was doing. If you have some spoiled undisciplined brat then no they aren't autistic, just brats because they weren't raised properly.
Concerning the article, My bet is since the two parents met at work or other professional gatherings, they both are working. Also both parents probably relocated to their place of work meaning there are no grandparents/family around. The kids are looked after by nannies and day care services. The parents probably don't interact with their kids as much as they should be. Thats not how you raise children.
Both of my parents hold masters degrees. After my mother had me, she stopped working. My father ran his own business and made enough money to support us and my mother became a homemaker (Her decision) and never complained about it. Both sets of grandparents were in the same neighborhood, my mothers parents were a 3 minute walk and my fathers parents a 10 minute drive. If my parents were going out, my grandmother would walk over and watch me and my brother or we were dropped off at her house. We never had a nanny. Once in a while my aunt would watch us as well, all family members were were familiar with. And my father always made time for the family, he had a trusted manager and would frequently take vacations with us (little trips to Vermont, we live in NYC). That simple upbringing was important because it reinforced social ties with both parents and immediate family members. These kids probably feel abandoned, distant or unloved by their parents.
... or more likely, miscarried when their mother ate a snickers bar, possibly before she even realised she was pregnant.
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
After coming in contact with one, they would swell up, and suffer hours of pain?
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
ADD/ADHD stopped being the trendy diagnosis last decade. Now the kids with behavioral problems get put on the "autistic spectrum".
I'll have to look that up. It does appear that several disorders have become routinely abused, including ADD/ADHD, autism, and bipolar disorders.