Can homeschooling cause Asperger's Syndrome?

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I am just wondering because I have a diagnosis, and my two closest siblings in age who were homeschooled under similar conditions developed social problems in their teenage years. I'm the only one who had severe issues in childhood, such as speaking late and other autistic symptoms. But both my brother and sister have the same flat affect, lack of prosody, and difficulty forming peer relationships in our twenties. My brother actually offends quite a few people and is ostracized from my family. He was perfectly normal as a child, however.

Our younger siblings (6 of them) were much less isolated growing up, and most of them turned out pretty NT. So I'm wondering if lack of nurturing and lack of peer relationships at certain ages can cause mild autism.

Of course, I have the NVLD also, but its cognitive manifestation is fairly mild in terms of what I'm not able to do. So it could be I just had minor natural social problems that cascaded due to social isolation as a child.

It's an interesting possibility. I lived in China for a bit, and it's a pretty common idea that Asperger's is caused by poor parenting and social isolation as critical ages. It seems like it could be true in some cases.

Last edited by Tyri0n on 09 Feb 2013, 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

No it doesn't cause it or else all NTs would have it who were also homeschooled.

Many homeschool parents go out of their way to create social opportunities for their children while mine didn't. At all. This, coupled with the adult mildness of my autism, leads me to at least wonder.

Another interesting idea would be if bad parenting/little access to sunlight/little peer exposure as a child could combine to cause NVLD.

I was autistic before I was homeschooled.
Mom put me in all different sorts of social situations, and they all failed.

She homeschooled me because our school system didn't have a gifted program. But she kept pushing the social stuff. I just didn't care. Made 1 friend.

In my experience, my Asperger's drove her to homeschool me - my giftedness stems directly from it.

I was too ret*d for school by the time I was of the age for it. Whatever it was caused developmental delays across a broad front.

I'm not saying that all cases of autism are caused by bad parenting, but only that some mild cases might be. I was developmentally delayed before school age, as were you, but this doesn't necessarily rule out home environment as a cause.

You are either NT that needs to work on social skills or you are ASD that was ASD since birth. Homeschooling cannot cause Autism; only brain-wiring can do that.

Can't environmental factors cause brain wiring problems that could lead to a diagnosis of ASD? I could imagine that bad parenting could cause symptoms to manifest quite early, like around 1-2 years of age.

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here, but it's something about which I can't help wondering. I believed this for many years until I started talking to my parents about how I was as a child, saw some long lost videos of me as a child, and got an ASD diagnosis. I've had to live with these ideas for years. And my girlfriend in China, who was a psychiatry Masters student, insisted that my flat affect and trouble reading people and visual-spatial issues were from childhood neglect and isolation. So don't judge me too hard.

Last edited by Tyri0n on 09 Feb 2013, 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have noticed a few people over this site equate various conditions with AS, just because they have both conditions. It is easy to do, and I cannot say whether some of things are not somehow more likely because of the aspergers.
But note, NT's do suffer depression, do have thyroid issues, do have vitamin D deficiency, do get absent minded, can prefer regular routines, can find they get tired from too much stimulation, can be shy, can struggle to talk in public etc.
And AS people can be OK in public situations, can hold a conversation, can have a job, can be married, can raise children etc.

I understand the temptation to analyze the details of your life and look to explain it in terms of being an aspie - this is what I have been doing for weeks. But people are complex whether they have AS or not, and you may never know how some things may have been different if different choices had been made. This is part of the human condition for everyone.

Recently a couple of people on this site have offended me because they misunderstood what I was trying to say, and, just like in my non-internet life, I have no idea what they think I meant, but apparently it was bad. Then I realized, you can be an aspie, and be an a**hole as well, or judgmental, or rude, or jump to conclusions.
Some aspies have experienced very difficult childhoods, suffering being bullied, abused, ostracized, lonely. This would make anyone depressed, angry, defensive. The fault is not with the victim, but in whoever allows NT children to get away with being insensitive little monsters, and in adults who never learned to accept that it is OK to be different. And in society being generally ignorant to this whole issue.
We share certain traits among us, more or less, but we are still human and prone to all of the lovely faults and foibles of the species.

Don't forget that if someone has AS, they may suffer worse in the school environment because of the "conditions" they would be subjected to. It could add other mental conditions to the AS.

Having said that, I did learn to behave like a human through exposure. But most of my progress happened in my later school years after I realized I was different, and that I could learn to appear more like everyone else. And after I grew a tough enough skin to try to be more proactive about my role in interactions.

If it caused it most people throughout history would have been autistic.

Some believe so. My mom thinks my ear infections and hearing loss is what caused me to have an ASD because it made my brain wire differently and I got ASD symptoms.

No. Bad parenting can make existing autism worse, but it can't make you autistic.



Look up Bruno Bettelheim and refrigerator mothers for the long debunked theory that parenting can cause autism.

Someone who seems normal in childhood but develops symptoms like flat affect and social impairments might be displaying schizoid personality disorder or prodromal schizophrenia. Magical thinking would indicate the possibility of schizotypal personality disorder.

I massively agree. AS is something you're born with. Thats been proven.

I went to school and I have AS. I had one friend through school, who was the one who initiated the friendship, had she not, I would likely have been friendless. By your reasoning how do you explain the vast majority of Aspies who did go to school?

My two AS children have both spent periods at school and periods home-educated. It didn't make the slightest bit of difference to them when they were at school, they still had socialising problems and all their other traits.

Even if you aren't interacting with your peers you are still interacting with someone, siblings, parents, other relatives, postman, shop-keeper, librarian, neighbour or whatever. It is only when people are devoid of human contact (such as kept locked up in a room without being allowed to speak to anyone) that they would develop related behavioural traits, or perhaps in some forms of abuse. Those traits wouldn't necessarily match ASCs though.

You question lack of nurturing, are you saying your parents didn't nurture you? If so, then how come all the other siblings you have are the majority NT? Being home-educated doesn't mean you are not nurtured (in fact usually are more nurtured, it's a big sacrifice parents that home-educate make for their children). Perhaps the children in your family who were home-educated were home-educated because your parents saw their Aspie differences and realised they would not flourish in school.

Just look at the animal kingdom (of which we are after all, a part). They don't send their young off en masse to a huge group of peers to learn. They learn from the parents and other close relatives. They stay in their family group generally speaking. And they don't mature with developmental problems, it is the normal way. It is schools that are the artificial environment and fail so many children in so many ways (and that doesn't even mention children with SENs).

Your brother could have been the passive subtype who went unnoticed until he was older.

Last edited by whirlingmind on 09 Feb 2013, 10:15 am, edited 2 times in total.

It is tempting to ascribe reasons "post hoc" - this "follows", therefore "caused by". It is natural that we look for "reasons". In the prenatal environment, we seek toxins, vaccines, flu ... some "natural", some "synthetic". Mother caused it, corporations caused it, government caused it ... we don't like the sh** happens stance.

Certainly our intuitions can be right, but we need to critically examine our reasons.

While "we" do not have a definitive causal answer for why autism occurs, we do have empirically supported "good reasons" for believing that ASD is NOT caused by childhood neglect. We do have good reasons to believe that we are BORN with these brains. China sounds much like how the west viewed schizophrenia "back in the day" - ever hear the term "schizophrenogenic mother"? This from professionals, not just an ignorant public.

Anyways, given that ASD is apparent at a time when we are "all homeschooled", so to speak, it is hard to imagine a causal relationship between an "isolated" home school environment and ASD.

I am not sure how close in age your two older siblings are to yourself, but you did have peers - albeit siblings. It seems interesting that 6 out of 9 are "pretty NT" from the same family - people change, but it seems a pretty radical turn-about that your parents can change so much as to be "causal" for 3 and not for the other 6. Odds are pretty good given the purported hereditary factors that in a large family more than one of you will be somewhere on the spectrum ... maybe even one or both of your parents? You could all be spectrum kids, you three elder sibs, to varying degrees. I have one brother, we are both public schooled (aside from a year I schooled myself), and we both "both" had and have great social difficulties.

However, I am wondering about your claim that your brother was "perfectly normal" as a child. I have a few thoughts: symptoms may have been missed; "perfectly normal" as a child does not seem to indicate a child in distress destined for later social problems; he could be suffering from a distinct psychiatric disorder which tends to acutely manifest during the turbulent teen years and early adulthood; or any of numerous other 'reasons'. I can only conjecture, but the causal claim does not jibe, in my line of thinking, with this assessment. I don't know any of you and I am just playing around with ideas.

Bottom line is, I suppose, we are more than our ASD and things that happen to us during childhood might present in ways that may expressed through our unique processing and sensory experiences. Your home environment will contribute to "you", but it is not all of what makes you "you."

No . . . but it probably saves the child from having to learn how to pass. Oh how I wish I had been home schooled.

people are a product of their environments.