I realize that i grew up in a family that didn't know how fortunate we were to have four happy, healthy children. This realization led me to the topic of this paper: how does having an autistic family member affect a family? in order to understand the effects this disability has on a family it is first mandatory to understand the characteristics of an individual living with autism. This paper will introduce the history, current theoretical causes and treatments of autism. After doing research to write a concise paper addressing the above topics i realized something was missing the admiration i feel for the parents of autistic children, the emotions behind working and living with autistic children and the grief of realizing these children are autistic. So, also included in this paper are personal statements and stories of mothers and fathers of autistic children.

Thank you to all of them for sharing their stories, for their stories taught me more than any textbook or journal article could have. This term was first applied to schizophrenics by eugen bleuler, a swiss psychiatrist. Bleuler used this term to address the characteristic of certain schizophrenics who appeared to have their own style of thinking, autistic thinking. Autistic thinking is the view that the universe revolves around oneself and that the outside world has no effect on the self nevid et al. Leo kanner, a professor at johns hopkins university at the time, applied the word autism to a group of children who he observed as having behavioral problems, social problems, communication problems and appeared to be self absorbed edelson.

It is due to the lack of social interaction that kanner applied the term autism society for the autistically handicapped. In the fifty three years that autism has been the term of choice for the developmental disorder consisting of avoiding social contact, stereotyped behaviors and slow, or lack of, development of a useful language much has been discovered. Autism, although one of the largest disabilities to affect children, five in every ten thousand births, is not constant. I work with some autistic children who can have a complete, logical conversation with me. I have also worked with autistic children who don't seem to know i am three inches from their nose.

A diagnosis of autism is usually made by the child's third birthday but, there are signs from birth that the child is different. An autistic child is more likely to resist affection, arching back and not staying still when being held, than is a child without autism. Autistic children are also usually described as being easy babies to take care of.

It is not until the child should be developing language and social skills that parents realize something is different about their child. The dsm iv is the first psychologically based text that identifies the varying degrees of autism. Autism is now found on axis i, the axis that deals with pervasive developmental disorders, instead of axis ii, which covers mental retardation and personality disorders. For a diagnosis of autism to be made six symptoms from three major areas: social interaction, communication and stereotyped behavior patterns must be present before the age of three.

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There must be at least two symptoms associated with social interaction and one in each of the other areas edelson. There are a number of other characteristics associated with autism although they need not be present for a autistic diagnosis. Features of autism may also include the following: resistance of being touched, ignorance of heat and cold, no sensation of pain, fascination with sounds and tastes, giggling or weeping for no apparent reason, absence of emotions or reactions, self injurious behaviors and self stimulatory behaviors society for the autistically handicapped. An example of an autistic child's ignorance of heat and cold occurred recently when we were at the beach. The water at the beach was very cold to the touch of my co workers and yet, a young girl who is diagnosed with autism ran straight into the water with no reaction to the coolness of it.

Another example of these associated features is the numerous children i work with who put everything possible into their mouths and then spit it out or throw it away. Almost all of these children smell the object before placing it into their mouth. Self stimulatory and self injurious behaviors are the more prevalent of the associated features of autism and will be discussed in length below. Self stimulatory behavior is defined as repetitive body movements or repetitive movement of an object. An individual with a visual self stimulatory behavior is likely to stare at lights, move fingers in front of his/her eyes and flap his/her hands. His hand flapping behavior is usually preceding a self injurious behavior or an act of injurious behavior towards another person.