Wealthy parents associated with autism?

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It seems that autistic people are more likely to have wealthy parents. So I thought I'd do a poll...

I don't know what the precise definition of "wealthy" is in this case, but I would guess it's on the low side, i.e., not just old money and billionaire new richies, but also including highly educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.

One theory is that this co-relation is actually due to the fact that wealthy people tend to wait longer and have children when they're older, in order to finish lengthy education, get solid careers going, etc. (I have a separate poll on parental age).

Any thoughts on the matter are welcome.

Dad was self employed and had some money, but he lived in the city, while my mum raised four kids either having to ask him for money or working really crap jobs. We lived in a social security house in a bad neighbourhood. And were probably lower working middle class.

Hmmm... this raises a question - had your parents lived together, would they have been considered wealthy? 'Self-employed and had some money' sounds like it would fit the definition of wealthy for the purposes of the poll...

Augh... this stuff is so complicated. Our governing elite probably already knows what causes autism - they have all the information in the world to look at, while we grope in the dark here...

Not upper class by any means, but my parents definitely had/have enough money to be part of the upper upper middle class.

Wow - what an awesome quote!

Well he had a lot of money. He taught Yoga in the city. We probably would have had more money had my parents stayed together.
A few problems though. My older brother and sister were little terrors. When my other older sister and me came along dad didn't want to raise us.
Then there were a few affairs by both parents.
And mum couldn't stand my dad because of many of his traits. He never knew he was on the spectrum though.

Autism to me starts in the womb. It's either genetic or something interrupts the growing process of the fetus. My birth wasn't exactly smooth.

This is the latest breakthrough in autism research:
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/52940/

We were somewhere around the upper-lower class/lower-middle class line.

They always had enough money to pay the bills and to have a holiday, but the reason for that was because they were sensible (buy the cheap store ownbrand product rather than pay extra for a label) wouldn't be any means have considered them "wealthy".

my parents were (and my father is still) quite rich.

i guess that i was able to accommodate my needs without anxiety having rich parents, and i was less urged to "join the world" of stark reality.

i am not sure how i would have turned out if my homelife was in turmoil.

i always had a solid base behind me from which i could launch my aimless rockets of futility.

and when they fell back to earth, there was no harm done, and i could go to sleep in my soft bed without remorse or fear of tomorrow being bleak.

My parents started out very poor but by the time I was nine or ten they were squarely in the middle class.

Dirt poor. Ice on the inside of the bedroom walls. Fridge with only mustard in it. No kidding.

I've read the study this idea was based upon as part of a previous thread. You can find it with a search. The study was very poorly designed. Most likely, it is the wealthy parents who are best able to afford the diagnoses and whose children are more likely to be seen as having a problem rather than being a problem.

Bingo.

The part I bolded is exactly what I thought after I've seen the OP.

Agree with the last few posts. My family thought they were wealthy when they came to the U.S., but that was compared to their lives in Hungary. For the U.S., I don't think they'd even be middle class.

This correlation is BS and exists solely in the US just because it's only wealthy parents who can afford to get their kids diagnosed over there.

My parents are fairly average in terms of wealth. Well, maybe a little above the average, but we certainly aren't rich. Yet