The Effects of Autism on Children and Their Families

There is no question that autism affects the whole family. What studies have been trying to prove for the past few decades is exactly how the child with autism and his family affect each other. Every relationship in the family changes once a child with autism enters the picture. Husbands and wives fight, parents and children are at odds

Based on this research, it is clear that autism does not just affect the autistic child. This research, however, does not really touch on the effects on younger siblings. There was one hypothesis stated that younger children might be more troubled due to their lack of parent-child bonding previous to the birth of the handicapped child, but the hypothesis says nothing of how they are troubled. This research looks to find out if being the younger sibling has an effect on attention-seeking. Younger siblings often feel that their older siblings accomplish everything first and get more attention because of it. When children have autism, however, they get even more attention as their parents take them from doctor to doctor trying to find a “cure.” Therefore, it would be a good hypothesis that younger siblings of children with autism crave attention even more than younger siblings of children without autism. This attention can come from anyone just as long as it is directed towards the younger sibling.

Children rarely realize when they have become attention seekers, so to study this, the researchers had to observe them with their peers. They also felt that observation would be a good way to measure behavior work ethics. They chose laboratory observations, as it would be hard to make a natural environment with such a specific group of children. First they had to find participants. They felt that very young children might not yet show the effects and older teenagers might be past the point of craving attention from anyway. Therefore they focused on 40 boys and girls between the ages of 7 and 12. Twenty of the children had older siblings with autism, and the other 20, the control group, had older siblings with no known psychological problems. They also needed the children to be living in the same home as their autistic sibling. To find the participating children, the researchers first went to a local school for children with autism. They left pamphlets explaining the study with the teachers who passed them on to the parents. They then went to a local elementary school and did the same thing albeit with specifications that the children must have an older sibling who still lived at home but had no known psychological impairments. When the parents who were interested got back to them, they went into more detail about it and asked if they could talk to the younger siblings first. They couldn’t let them know why they were being observed because they might not act in a normal manner. They did, however, want to tell them that they would have an opportunity to play games with other children around their ages. The researchers got verbal consent from the children and written consent from the parents.

Sometimes, no matter what the interaction between siblings actually is, it has a measurable effect on the non-autistic siblings. Some children with autistic siblings have no problems, some have minor problems, and some have significant problems. In 2003, Hastings studied the effect of an autistic sibling based on their mothers’ answers on questionnaires. He wanted to know if the handicapped sibling had an effect and whether the effect was different depending on the age, sex, closeness in age, maternal stress, or where the sibling lived (some lived in special care residences). These questions were all included in the questionnaire. Results showed that the normal siblings are at an increased risk of poor psychological adjustment when compared to children who have no handicapped siblings. (Hastings, 2003) There were also siblings found who would probably benefit from psychological help for other minor developmental abnormalities.

It is hard to know, however, if the reason for this is poor adjustment or the extended phenotype of autism to 1st degree relatives. Autism is, after all, known to have genetic links. The reason for its rarity is because most autistic children will never go on to reproduce, and

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