That’s the title of this commentary in EducationNews.org:

It has been a high profile year for autism. A severely autistic Minnesota boy was banned from church.An autistic kindergartner in Florida was voted out of class. A mother and her autistic son were thrown off an American Airlines flight at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. And another mother and autistic toddler were kicked off an airplane in Houston reportedly because the boy was repeating ‘bye, bye plane’ during the safety speech …

Perhaps we are hearing more about autism in the news because there are more autistic children in America than ever before. The CDC’s most recent study estimates one out of every 150 children over the age of 8 is autistic or suffers from a related disorder. Today, 560 thousand Americans under the age of 21 have autism.T hat number is hundreds of thousands higher than just 30 years ago.

 Four times as many boys as girls suffer from autism, which is roughly the gender balance for ADHD as well. I suspect autism is not a big player in the boy troubles, but rather further evidence of the relative biological fragility of young boys. ADHD, especially the rampant overprescription of attention deficit drugs, strikes more as a symptom than a cause of the boy troubles. From my perspective, boys have always been more biologically fragile; therefore, that fragility can’t be the cause of the recent school declines among boys.

I’ll admit, though, that I have a minority opinion on those issues. To read a contrary view (that biological factors can account for the recent boy troubles), I recommend Dr. Leonard Sax’s new book, Boys Adrift.

Tags: adhd, autism

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