Not Born With It

To those who deny an epidemic and insist autism is born, not made, I'd like to give a glimpse of Leah's early life. I do know parents who say their children were different from birth, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who tell stories of a period of typical development, followed by regression. Sometimes the change was sudden and devastating; other times, as with Leah, autism took hold over a longer period of time.So who's right? Both, in my opinion. Until more meaningful efforts are made at subtyping, and until the  scientific community is willing to listen to a wide variety of parent accounts – as I have – without dismissing them, our chances of solving this riddle really aren't very good. I don't think there is a single reason why autism is on the rise (the new rate, 1 in 54, hasn't gotten much attention). Rather, there seems to be a variety of ways a young child's system can be damaged. In Leah's case, I can't point to one, but looking back at her early life, I can glimpse the differences in her before and after changes started to happen.

The difference between the child smashing her cake on her first birthday, untroubled by fists full of sticky icing, and the four-year-old who avoids eye contact with a camera, is striking.