Disclaimer
If you are a parent of an autistic child and are seeking a cure outside the medical mainstream, this post is not for you and offers no cures or protective therapies. This post is written for researchers.
Is autism caused, not by too many unmet needs, but by too few? Perhaps speech is acquired only if the child has sufficient motivation to say something. Such motivation may normally be provided by a manageable amount of unmet need due to parental inexperience in the case of a first child and competition from older siblings in the case of later children. If a parent believes the former causation but the truth is the latter, then parental responses to the first sign of developmental trouble will lead straight to a pernicious positive feedback that produces full-blown autism. That first bit of developmental trouble may well be genetically determined and account for all the well-known genetic correlations of autism. The caregiver anxiety level is here predicted to correlate with autism even more. That proposition is already supported by research. The issue is how to design an ethical randomized controlled trial that shows how the anxiety correlation arises. The questions raised here may help in the design of such an experiment.
Picture credit: https://unsplash.com/@anna_loup
