Continuum Concept , or Bring back Swaddling

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Remember that there is a good chance that your children are on the spectrum as well. I know it's difficult to relate to them sometimes. But you are the only one that address your child's needs. You know better than anyone what the sensitivities are that cause those needs! Follow your instincts. Do for them what you would do for yourself. It will work. I promise!

I can see how neglect can lead to AS like symptoms, but I don't think it alone causes it. When my sonis asleep I'll wrap him in swaddling to keep him warm and let him rest. This will keep him from rolling and decreasethe chance of SIDS. When he's awake and not eating, bathing, or getting changed I'll read to him, play music, sing, and take him out to town to show off. ^_^ I want to try to teach him sign lanuage and follow doctors instructions to the T.

My mother-in-law wants to make this hard, though. Me and my husband are staying with them for now and I swear she thinks she's the mother of my baby! I hear her talking to her friends about how it's my baby but she'll raise it how she will, it makes me afraid to leave her alone with my baby... Any rule I try to set she'll explode about, and they aren't anything difficult. Once she tried to kick me out because I told her the baby will be fed milk until the doctor says baby food can be introduced. She began yelling about how I'll starve him if I don't introduce cereal or rice pudding at two or three months! How do I keep her from taking my son without getting me and my husband kicked onto the street?

What instincts?

NOT talking about "neglect", Goche, but about traditional childcare approaches, approved by all, encouraged and advised by Health Visitors. Baby "put-down" time between feeds , in a quiet room away from the family noise . The longer the mother can "put" her baby down the better , seems to be the general consensus, and sadly was mine too cos I was so utterly not up for all that contact!!

Goche21, I'm sorry to hear about the pressure you're under there. Best of luck.

Last edited by ouinon on 27 Oct 2007, 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's emotional neglect. Failing to show care or love to the baby and leaving it scarred emotionally for life. Babies need to be coddled and loved, a bit of quiet time is acceptable, but mental stimulation is key to raising a well-rounded kid. Just because it's socially accepted doesn't mean it's right.

Yes, but I think the most important aspect of the "neglect" is not emotional , exactly , whatever that means , but SENSORY , pure physical, sensory deprivation. Literally. And that has been established as causing autistic behaviours in animals thus deprived. Don't even need to "mentally stimulate"! !, just carry them around ; that is all the mental stimulation they need.

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Oct 2007, 3:00 am, edited 2 times in total.

That's what I meant by follow your instincts. The experts aren't always right. I think that mothers know what to do for their children. I mean, look how the "experts" have mucked up the world. They started saying that you shouldn't spank your kids and now we have a whole generation of ungrateful little sycophants that can't handle responsibility. Imagine!

I did NOT know what to do.( as I said just at top of page ! !) I did a lot wrong , and the little bits here and there that I did right were a struggle against all my automatic reactions!! I had no instincts to speak of. They had been effectively stripped from me by the sensory deprivation I experienced as a baby!! !

"Ungrateful sycophants" sounds suspiciously like my own mother talking about an aspergers child , me !!I think a bit of spanking now and then may does less harm than the distance and isolation experienced by a baby ( remember talking about 0-6 month olds here ! !) who is left for long periods between feeds , untouched, unheld, unmoving , with no information/stimulation etc!! Read the Liedloff articles. The first six months of life feel like twenty adult years, or more. The brain is still forming. What will it "grow on " if the baby is alone in an unmoving cot for hours on end. It will grow on the feelings highly magnified , of its stomach, of distant sounds, of the feel of inanimate objects. It will turn up its sensors to full volume. Later on it will be almost unable to stand the ordinary human world.

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Oct 2007, 3:04 am, edited 3 times in total.

I can see a bit of a confounding variable here.

My mother has a lot of AS traits, and from what I read on this forum it seems like many of us have relatives who are on the spectrum, some of you even say that your whole families are. Now, my mother always says that she had no maternal instincts, and that after she's given birth to me she asked if I could be washed before she held me. I imagine that a lot of autistic/AS parents might be a little cold or aloof in the way they treat their children, (not all of course, but I should imagine the incidence of it would be higher than for NT parents).

This would change the causality. Rather than sensory/emotional deprivation in childhood leading to autism, parents with autistic genes would be more likely to give birth to autistic children. They would ALSO be more likely to rear their children in a way that others might perceive as cold, but this would not make the child autistic - the child would already be autistic.


Incidently, I'm not at all against medical science trying to find a way to prevent/cure autism. I just don't agree with this particular theory. Sadly it would also be near impossible to test on humans in an ethical manner.

I dislike the word " cold" . I think it brings up old stuff about individuals and their emotional problems, whereas I am talking about institutionalised , widely approved "putting child down between feeds" routines taught to mothers everywhere as appropriate mothering. I am not talking about specific women here and there with AS acting in any particular way.

Actually it might be very easy cos most people use the sensory deprivation model ! ! The most diificult would be finding a large enough group of mothers/parents prepared to follow Liedloffs continuum concept and carry their children around all the time ! !

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Oct 2007, 4:55 am, edited 4 times in total.

Calm down. Look at this generation for goodness sake, a man urinated on a dieing woman, kids ganging up and beating on a AS kid in the woods, one bunch I knew before took a pregnant dog, cut it open, murdered the puppies, and left the corpse into a cow patch. These are the psycopaths. No respect for life, no moral values, and no mental disorder to blame for it. Just all in all evil kids. Then the parents cry and say 'we did our best, I don't know what I did wrong!' you ask if they spanked their kids and it's a blantant no.

Look at my family, we kids were punished in a group, repeatedly we'd be spanked, then did push-ups for half an hour and spanked again until someone confessed. I'd always crack first, and my brothers knew that, so they could get away with more. Is it any wonder one is a sociopath now?

Umm, I'm calm!!

What about you though? ! !

Okay, I understand now. It's different than my experience so I needed the cue to get at what you meant. So, what you are saying is that maybe you are following the pattern and example set by your own upbringing? You weren't cared for in that manner and your automatic reaction with your own child was to push him/her away? I'm trying to understand, so don't jump my ass.

I meant ungrateful sycophants in the sense of a generation of kids that expect everything to be handed to them and aren't afraid of or respectful of authority.

You were using exclamation marks to symbolize yelling, it hardly seems calm.

I'm moody, leave it be -_- I'm in a touchy mood today about my family.

OK. Well then you will need some data on how the incidence of autism changes in relation to a cultures child rearing practices. You could perhaps compare different cultures today or through history. However, the use of this data would open up a whole new can of worms, because whatever correlations you found you would not be able to prove causality. Of course, any data on the incidence of autism will only ever tell you how often it is diagnosed, and not its true incidence - and this would be even more true if you wanted to focus in on Aspergers.

My post above described a confounding variable you might find if you were to correlate the incidence of autism with personal child rearing practises. I'm sorry if its not what you were orignally getting at.

What I'm saying is that sensory deprivation in babyhood creates or largely contributes to Sensory Processing Disorders.
And as SPDs are apparently co-morbid at 75% with AS that maybe the deprivation even contributes to some aspects of AS itself.

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Oct 2007, 2:55 am, edited 4 times in total.