Should aspies have children?

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You are the best and perfect parent before you have children.

I recently watched some YouTube videos and taught myself to French braid my daughter's hair for EXACTLY that reason. How coincidental!

OMG! The French braids!! !

I always wanted them and my mother couldn't do them - she is not on the spectrum. (She is NPD, but I don't blame that for the lack of French braids really, she just didn't know how, didn't care for them and this was pre-YouTube days.)

I have one son only, so I don't have to worry about the French braids.

there's two potential issues here: genetic risk and parenting ability.

Since the genetic risk issue is not well understood, I don't think a definitive answer is possible here. The risk is still relatively low (up from 1% to 10%). There are plenty of people with heart disease or other difficulties that are heritable, and for most of those we don't chastise them for having children. Still, it's a consideration for the person with an ASD who wants children (or a person who has a first degree relative with an ASD).

Parenting ability is another consideration - this really depends on the individual. The social deficits may get in the way at times, so it's a legitimate concern. However, many people with ASDs would make fine parents. There are plenty of NTs who are horrible parents - and people don't argue that they don't have a right to have children.

As an NT watching from the sidelines, it's not my place to judge or tell others how to lead their lives. There are no conclusive reasons to believe that a person with an ASD would definitely cause harm to their children (which would be the only reason that it would be anyone else's business). So the question of "should a person with ASD have children?" can only be answered by that person.

Last edited by EmileMulder on 30 May 2014, 9:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I was never fond of French braids and it was something my mom wanted to do to my hair. Sometimes it's fun to just have it done because then you get to enjoy the feeling of someone messing with your hair. Then it would suck when it would end.

I was always envious of the french braids. My mom (NT) was very into not putting forth effort for those kinds of things. I knew not to ask. She always tried to make me have short hair and I would try to refuse to get my hair trimmed b/c it she would always make the stylist cut it short. So I would have short hair and then stall getting it cut again as long as I could ti get it to get it to grow out as much as possible.

I can imagine the basis on which you make this hypothetical evaluation. I'm thinking this is a statement better not made. But I suppose you must have your reasons

I was trying to emphasize the fact that it's not my place to judge regardless of my personal feelings, for the benefit of other NTs out there. Anyhow, I can see how it may be misinterpreted, so I'm sorry if I offended. I revised my original post to better reflect my original intention.

Thank you, EmileMulder.

I appreciate your intention and effort.

while my mom was never diagnosed, i am, i feel like she has more traits than i do and the main reason she wasn't diagnosed was because of the time period she was born into. so a diagnosed parent might have an easier time, but i think the issue will still be similar.

we both interrupt each other (and everyone else! ) at times when we get excited and passionate about things, i understand that people get annoyed and hurt by that and try to at least backtrack and apologize, but she is still mostly oblivious.

also she used to beat me for no good reason and afterwards apologize, by singing, for not having the words to express herself at the time she hit me. i realize now it was likely her having a melt down. while i don't blame myself, like many on the spectrum i was a stubborn and curious and i can understand how that made her feel trapped.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE[/youtube]

none of this is to say that i feel autistic people shouldn't have kids, but i think they need support and knowledge in different areas and i think it would be a mistake to think that it won't be hard. i think autistic people do have an advantage of potentially being able to identify areas they will have problems in 1st, but it's still a lot of work.

i definitely felt loved and cared for, that wasn't the problem, it was more understanding the "theory of mind" stuff. like a small thing, but she'd cut the tags off my clothes because she assumed they'd bother me, like they bother her, but never understood that was a decision i wanted to make for myself. if wanted to do anything that didn't fit into her "routine" or plans for me, it was always a huge undertaking to explain in extreme detail why i wanted to do something and the specifics of what i'd be doing.

or if i wanted a toy or game or whatever, most of the time wanting it wasn't enough, she needed explicit reasons to understand and if i didn't give those reasons she'd say "no" because she couldn't imagine a reason she would want it. people joked that i was going to be a lawyer because of the case i'd have to make, but it was incredibly draining, not something i enjoyed.

i didn't get the help i needed until much later in life, in part, because i couldn't "prove" the reasons for my problems with school or not being able to get "easy" things done or feeling overwhelmed because i didn't even know the why myself, so how could i argue it.

As with any parent: It depends on the potential parent.

My husband and I are both somewhere on the spectrum. We are doing ok. I think the biggest challenge is that one daughter has ASD and the other, we are told, probably has ADHD or ADD although we haven't done testing yet. She drives the three of us NUTS. I would say that the genetic component is what potential parents need to think about. We want a third child, that was always the plan. But to be totally honest we don't think it would be fair to the two we have if we had a third. We oth work full time and are spread thin... if we had another exceptional child, we worry that one of the three would get the shaft in terms of attention. We don't want to do that so we are probably going to stick with the 2 we have.

CWA, I've got your solution right here (my ADHD son is actually my favorite kid; couldn't do without him and his constant scanning and over-the-top enthusiasm, although geez does my auditory hypersensitivity wish he had a volume control). You, and your ADHD kid, need "Hyperactive Heaven."

Right now it's in my MIL's future living room (we were blessed to find a duplex, for sale as one unit, within our price range). It has empty cardboard boxes, and old sheets (for building stuff) and jump ropes and mini-tramps and big, soft plastic balls (the kind you can buy for about $5 at Big Box s**thole) and a CD player (cassette player would be better if you can find one, and so would MP3-- they don't skip, but a CD player is what we've got) for music and a fan for keeping cool while bouncing off the walls.

At $30 a piece, the mini-tramps are the only expensive pieces of equipment in the room; I think I did the whole setup for less than $200, counting the CD player. Other alternatives (which I had set up in the attic in our last place) are a double mattress that someone threw out on the floor (actually really cool, much cooler for jumps and flips than the mini-tramps, but my space is actually more limited here as I have to be ready to turn Hyperactive Heaven back into Old Lady's Living Room in a few weeks).

I think I'm going to put it all in a shed out back. Even in the winter time-- we will run electric and put a heater and fan up in the rafters if necessary, because I am IN LOVE with Hyperactive Heaven.

As for beating kids when having a parental meltdown-- DON'T. JUST DON'T. There is no shame in having a meltdown-- even NTs do it. There is, however, no reason that you can't keep your explosion off your kids. If they won't go to their rooms, you go to yours. I go outside and smoke, or hole up in my room and bang my head on the wall. It only takes about 10 or 15 minutes to get it under control. I don't give a crap what kind of wiring you have in your head (and I do believe in the occasional spanking for dangerous or blatantly disrespectful behavior in kids too little to reason with). You DO NOT "lose it" and hit someone else. Whether you are a parent or not, it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to not let that happen.

I had an odd to crazyish conversation with my childs developmental pediatrician about how in 20 years geneticists will be able to give you the choice of, for lack of a better word, fixing the genes in vitro of something like that...

Tough stuff.

I must have missed something because I didn't see anywhere in her post where she said she does this to her kids.

Different post-- someone's ASD Mommy from Somewhere in the Vicinity of Hell story.

Should have been more clear when switching tracks.

I think this is like saying controlled fusion is just a few decades away, as people have been doing since the 1960s.

I'm pretty sure we don't know nearly enough about DNA to say such a thing with any confidence. People don't really understand how genes are regulated in most cases and are just starting to tease apart they way methylation can inactivate a gene or how it is that a single nucleotide change at one locus can cause a profound effect in an organism while the deletion or reversal of a few hundred thousand bases in another place can have no discernable impact. We have a map of the code and we have a pretty good idea of how some parts of the code can be transcribed into RNA which is then translated into proteins--but the reality that the same sequence can be used in different ways by different cells. The genome is a thing of mind-boggling complexity and we are just beginning to cut through it's mysteries with our analytical explorations.

The scientists and practitioners of a few generations from now will probably look back on our understanding of these mechanisms as a physicist researching quantum mechanical effects looks back on Newton's mechanical universe. What we have learned is wondrous and that we have looked this deeply into this awesome complexity and found the underlying order that we have is exhilarating, but there is clearly much. much more to understand. The rate of change is increasing exponentially, so 20 years may put such manipulations in our grasp, but then again, it may not. 3.2gigabases of information is a lot to process, particularly when we just don't know what most of it does...

If we did have the understanding and ability to make such modifications in the germline, how would you feel about making use of that knowledge? How do you gauge the ethics of this possibility?