What might have caused Autism in our Kid ?

Hi All,

In this post i am trying to ponder over, if the events that happened at different point in our life’s had anything to do with my son being on Autism Spectrum. When things did not go as expected we begin to doubt everything ……this process never seem to end,
until we become satisfied that one particular event might have been the culprit! We have been over this, the earlier we put aside the past events, the better focus we will get on the current and future events where we could actually make a difference.

During the pregnancy period, my wife used to say that our son never circled/spun fully in the womb, even though he had good movements and heartbeat. We have brought that to the attention of OBGYN, she commented that the pelvis area of my wife is not wide
enough, which looked like an acceptable answer as she is a short person. Also a month before delivery, the AFI levels were also down than the accepted levels, which means there is not enough water available inside the womb for the baby to circle around. We
were convinced that these reasons justify why he did not make full spin.
(However when my wife got pregnant for 2nd time, she had felt the baby making full spin, either the doctors justification for my first kid is wrong or my wife’s pelvis area has gotten bigger after our first kid)

My son began thumbsucking at the earliest and does it during sleep. My wife used to take his fingers out the mouth to prevent thumbsucking, however i was not a big fan of it. I told it is perfectly normal for the baby to thumbsuck, infact it is the only time a baby is allowed to do it and no one complains about it. Our pediatrician insisted that don’t force the fingers out of it, kids feel secured during thumbsucking it’s like a companionship to them, the habit will eventually wear off. However my wife had past history of events in her family, where there were kids who used to thumb suck at a much older age as well, and it took lot of experimentation to stop it, hence she was scared of that. My son did thumbsuck till the age of 4, mostly during sleeping or when he feels sleepy. (Our second child does not thumbsuck, she is 1.5 years old)

We were a joint family when my son was 1 year old, however we had another kid (My Brothers son) in the house who was 3 years old and very hyper active kind of a person. Hence he is like running around, throwing toys, making noise and not being aware that he could do harm to our son, so we kind of contained our son inside our bed room itself, he did not move around freely in the living area as he/we would have liked. This may have been few reasons by delay in development on his motor skills.

He skipped the crawling stage, from sitting up to standing up, he began walking directly, and there were no crawling involved rubbing the chest against the floor.

Since we already had an older kid in the house, we had the collection of tamil rhymes like Kanmani papa rhymes, Chellame Chellame all volumes and typical English rhymes etc., which used to run for him in the TV… My son was attracted to it, and began watching it with interest. So we encouraged lot of tv and rhymes for him. He had lot of TV time, which might have developed one way communication where he only listens, and there is no need for him to communicate for anything.

From Joint family, we became a nuclear family when he was less than 2 years of age, as a result the floor space become limited (stayed in smaller flat) and the number of family members he could interact were limited to myself and my wife. This might have brought down the interaction which others might have had to my son.

We blindly followed the Vaccination Chart provided by the Hospital file for my son. We avoided optional vaccinations, whatever is mandatory alone we have put for our son. We were clearly not aware of the conspiracies behind certain certain vaccines or vaccination in general.

All of the above events happened during the time frame when he was 1 year to 3 years old, we always think back of these events, like if such things, he might not have become autistic. Felt sharing this to plead the parents to have awareness, even a simple delay in a developmental milestone may not have an immediate impact, it might reflect somewhere in the future. As in our case, most of the parents having their first kid, will not know many things on your own, unless someone told you so, hence keep a baby diary note down on the important events like began smiling, roll over, sitting, standing, walking etc. .. Our brain cannot think back of these events when you are sitting in front of a therapist / doctor, as we are/ will be emotionally overwhelmed!

Regards,
Saranya and Karthik