An Autism Mother Rages: Television DOES NOT Cause Autism

At my own peril I have been ignoring the hypothesis - and I use the term lightly - from an economist who claims that watching too much television might cause autism.

He'll go away, I thought. He'll get academic brownie points for a paper that prompted Cornell University to write a press release. And then he'll go away. (Universities, even lofty ones, all want publicity these days. Press releases, after all cause enrollment, don't they? Just ask any economist with an instrumental variable).

Professor Michael Waldman will go away, I thought. Or he'll drown professionally, under a pile of angry e-mails from other scientists and from smart parents who command the scientists' attention, maybe he'll even get some angry messages from his own friends or relatives. Although Michael Waldman seems to have escaped the terror of having a kid with autism - he "cured" his own son, he claims, in part by shutting off whatever it is that children of economics professors watch these days -- the affliction has reached epidemic proportions. It is likely that he knows someone else who was not as lucky.

Unfortunately, while I was waiting for Professor Waldman to go away, he wound up on the front page the Wall Street Journal. (February 27). The story was below the fold but prominent enough to catch the attention this morning of my 16-year-old son Jack, who, as the son of two former newspaper reporters, makes it his business to read newspapers as seldom as possible - ice hockey stories notwithstanding.

"Autism" and "television" are two others news topics, though, for which he makes exceptions. And so this morning's combination was nearly irresistible.

"If this was true then I'd be the one who has autism," Jack noted as he cooked his own cheese omelet. "I watch a lot more television than Danny."

Danny, Jack's 19-year-old brother, as my readers know all too well, is severely autistic. He doesn't speak. He has trouble initiating. He needs to be talked through his shower. Like Jack, he is learning to cook, but for him it is a step-by-step excruciatingly slow process, one that requires an extraordinarily patient teacher and a lab-like set up.

We don't know why Danny has autism. As far as television is concerned, all we know is this: Danny spent the first three years of his life as a normal child, living with us in Mexico City and Hong Kong. We were foreign correspondents then, and often he traveled with us. In Mexico there wasn't too much on television that he liked. If he watched videos, I don't remember and I think I would. In Hong Kong Danny liked Raffi and Barney, the purple dinosaur. He liked the large swimming pool downstairs, riding his bicycle perilously close to the parking lot and exploring the city's vast transportation network. The Star Ferry, the Peak Tram, double decker buses and more. And he reacted to them appropriately, if a bit too much like his parents. Proud we were, nevertheless, the day he said: "F--- me, Daddy. We just missed the double bus."

Then over six months he stopped talking completely. Once in a while, nowadays, he says, "Mom." Or something else. Officially he is "non-verbal."

People have asked me if all that traveling and moving around caused it. If foreign countries caused autism. We left Hong Kong when Jack was eight months old, after all. And then our family only lived in New York and California.

Silly hypothesis, is what I always say.

"I always did watch a lot more television than Danny," Jack continued this morning.

Here's a sad truth: If you have a severely autistic child whom you are trying, against all odds to keep at home, then that child's younger siblings might watch too much television.

Study that, Professor Waldman.