My question as well.
Could it be that autism is largely an invented illness?
It’s hardly ‘invented’.
And it’s not just ‘bad parenting’ or kids who need to be spanked.
I had a great aunt who was ‘retarded’ in the vernacular of the 1940’s. She made eye contact, was verbal, social, affectionate. she was potty trained. She just had the abilities of a 5yr old.
Anyone who sees the head banging, drooling diaper wearing severe autistics would never confuse them with ‘retarded’ kids from the past.
We’ve got friends with a severely autistic son. He’s in diapers at the age of 15. He can also read anything you put in front of him and communicate via ipad. He’s never spoken a word. But he’s very very aware of what’s going on around him.
I don’t think that, at age 15, he’s wearing a diaper to get attention. I don’t think spanking him would serve to potty train him either.
The autustic kid I know has a very bad mental disorder that is quite different from being retarded, etc. It’s more like short circuts in the brain, fried wires trying to make connections...
I thought I had read that they don’t tend to live long into adulthood.
Not every retarded or autistic child is fake. Maybe you should go back to lurkin and not postin.
Ding, Ding, we have a winner. Austism was extremely rare until it was turned into a government-funded business.
Many children who would have been classified as retarded 60 years ago are called autistic today.
Many children with below average IQ and poor social skills are classified on the “autism spectrum”, qualifying them for extra services and money but inflating the incidence of “autism”.
The rise of autism is not a pandemic of a new neurological disorder but a matter of classification.