The Speed of Dark

It’s understandable that parents of children with autism, like parents of children with any developmental problem, want to know what caused  it–and often want to know who’s to blame.    Unfortunately, in the case of autism and childhood immunizations, a combination of greed, bad logic, and outright lying by some unscrupulous  “investigators” has created a situation in which innocent parents have come to believe that evil vaccines caused their children’s autism.

It’s not true.   Yet, like many errors, it’s become ingrained in some peoples’ minds–largely because of three factors.  First, it gives parents someone to blame and gets them off the hook with relatives.   If it’s caused by vaccines, they don’t  have to consider the known causes, including genetics.  Second, it makes a huge profit for those who promote the vaccine hypothesis and offer goods and services to ameliorate the supposed damage done by the vaccine.  And third, there’s the profit motive: if autism were caused by vaccines, then suing vaccine manufacturers (and now, the government because it’s taken over the liability) could make a lot of money for lawyers and parents alike.

To understand why the vaccine hypothesis is wrong requires some history as well as good science.

Read the rest of this entry »

Uneven development across various cognitive domains is more common than most people realize, but people with autism usually show extreme unevenness.    Anyone working with autistic children needs to be aware of these extremes–and mapping developmental levels in each domain can help target interventions to that particular child’s actual needs.    These interventions should not be aimed at raising the child’s gaps to equal his talents–or stifling the talents to the level of the gaps.  Instead, the goal should be to scaffold progress in each domain from where the child actually is, at the best rate that the child can manage in each.

I learned this first as a tutor, coming in to rescue a child who had started failing in a subject or had some other problem.   To do my job, I needed to find out what the child knew, what the child thought he/she knew, and what had gone wrong–as fast as possible and while building a working relationship with that child.

How do you approach this problem?   It starts with careful, precise observation of the child’s current behaviors in each domain.  Big sheets of graph paper help both the mapping and charting progress.   An ordinary “baby book” that gives general information about normal development allows parents to do at least a rough approximation themselves.

Read the rest of this entry »