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Notes -
My thoughts:
It’s hard to determine the relationship between vaccines and autism because of the confounder variables: Asperger’s has nothing to do with what we are talking about and is mislabeled as autism; parents of children who exhibit signs of autism are more weary about getting vaccines, and this applies to siblings; wealthier Americans are more likely to be vaccinated, may be less likely to have autistic children before the vaccine, but may be more likely to pursue an Asperger’s diagnosis for extra time on child’s tests; the least healthy parents are the least likely to opt in to all vaccines and the least likely to take child to doctor regularly …
You can reliably give monkeys autism symptoms by disrupting the natural mother-child bond, for instance Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys. The mother-child bond has been disrupted due to (1) early schooling, (2) stressed working mothers, (3) a generation of women who are not acculturated specifically for loving and bonding with young humans. This may have multigenerational effect, who knows?
the idea that the most STEM-brained men should mate with the most STEM-brained women is anomalous in history of humanity, this may have an effect
This is my wife and I. One of our sons has an autism diagnosis, in the > 99.9% good at math sense.
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Having looked at the historic situation around motherhood and parenting, particularly in early life, my guess is that the average modern western middle class woman spends much more time 1 on 1 with her young children than her predecessors a century or two ago.
From the survey data I've seen comparing the 1960s to today parents' time with their kids has increased, most notably and substantially for fathers, but also somewhat for mothers. (Though, we've only had the American Time Use Survey since 2003, and I don't know how much to trust the previous survey methods.)
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Agreed; if anything, what’s abnormal about modern life is the paucity of different adults with whom we interact during early childhood. These days, it’s pretty much just parents and perhaps daycare staff, rather than all manner of extended family plus usually members of a religious community.
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