Are Aspies likely to have children that are autistic?

Post Reply New Topic

If both the female and the male have Aspergers, it is relatively likely that their children will be autistic. My question is whether the children are more likely to be on the higher or lower end of the autism spectrum?

Given that the spectrum is not a line with ends on it, the only answers you're likely to get to that question are going to involve concepts that don't fit with the reality of what autism is. It's way too complex for that. The high and low ends are usually measured by a handful of superficial traits, and not always the same handful.

Personally my family seems to contain a lot of different sorts of autism. My brother and I are both autistic and we couldn't be more different. (Autism occurs on both sides of the family. My dad is autistic and my mom has traits. We also have a lot of other neurological atypicalities on both ends, so much that it'd be hard to find people who were "normal" even among nonautistics.) We would be considered by some to be on opposite ends of the spectrum but again that is based on that handful of traits and we each have both talents and deficits that the other doesn't.

Yes I do think so. I don't know about LFA though. But I think the child might be higher up on the spectrum if both parents were aspies but if one of them had AS and the other just had traits of it, I think the child's condition could still be higher. If possible the child could just have traits only. But it's still possible to have an NT child.

More likely to be autistic, and more likely to be mild disability rather than severe, because the majority of the autism spectrum is what can be generally considered "mild". (This is a matter of perspective, of course, but let's say "mild" is a GAF of 50 or higher averaged over time, just to put a concrete number on it. Can be a misnomer, of course; 50 is the midpoint of the scale and someone coping at that level still has significant problems.) However, you are right in saying that Aspie parents are more likely to have children with regular autism (including speech delay), because they are simply more likely to have children with all sorts of autism. I think the Silicon Valley effect is one example of a group of people with high levels of autistic traits producing more autistic children.

My mom probably has Asperger's, and my father was a speech-delayed Kanner's type; I'm diagnosed Asperger's but should technically be PDD-NOS because of childhood communication issues and adaptive-skills delays. I have a sister who is very likely to be Asperger's style autistic (early speech, early reading, pedantic, obsessive, not interested in peer relationships), and a sister who is introverted and probably asexual but otherwise NT.

Autism definitely runs in the family, and it tends to be all sorts of different types all together in the same family. It even happens in identical twins. They'll both be on the spectrum something like 95% of the time; but both of them having Autistic Disorder proper is rarer, maybe at the 60% level; so you'd see things like one aspie twin and one autie, or PDD-NOS in one and CDD in the other. I think brain development must be a chaotic system, with small changes creating large observable differences.

Likelihood Aspies will have AS kids? My experience and that of my family - significantly less than 50% chance your child will have the gift of uniqueness. Depending on how many kids you have, of course, I only have one so far and she's quite neurotypical. Out of a group of 6 siblings and cousins (of one generation) and 7 nieces and nephews (in the following) on the side of my family that seems to carry the strain, there are only two of us with diagnosable AS, and I strongly suspect my Paternal side Grandmother had it. So including parents, aunts and uncles, out of approximately 20 immediate family members, that's 3 Aspies. Your results may vary.

Likelihood an Aspie will produce a LF Autistic? I've never heard of that happening. In fact, I'm no scientist, but I'm inclined to interpret the research at this point to indicate that the two types may be different at the genetic level. Which would make it unlikely that one could ever produce the other.

I agree because of the above POV that there are differences in the genetic markers, meaning different types, not because of a Spectrum, which is a conceptual aide, not a Scientific Scale.

I agree with the quote above. As for how it's going in my family tree, my mom was a nt and my dad was an aspie (both are deceased). I'm their only offspring. I gave birth to two children who have an aspie mom and nt dad; two grandchildren - one aspie, one nt. No one is close to being a classic autistic. The aspies are typical aspies and the nts are typical nts.

Autistic traits definitely run in families. I have an LFA aunt and my mom suspects that her father (my maternal grandfather) was an Aspie. He was a very quiet, fidgety, and unsociable bank accountant.

I should clarify that as far as how we are or would be officially classified my family has people in the categories of AS, HFA, LFA, and PDD-NOS. My brother is dxed AS, I am dxed just plain autistic and the times i've been given a functioning label it's been severe or LF.

(I don't believe functioning labels are ever accurate (to be even close to accurate they would have to be "how good is this person at one particular skill at one particular point in time?", instead of being a label for the whole person. I think there are many types of people who get classified as autistic and probably many genes responsible, but it makes absolutely no sense that there would be a stark genetic divide between HFA and LFA because the categories themselves have been shown to be incredibly dubious (and from what I have seen, calling someone HF and someone LF says more about the skills valued by the person doing the describing, than about the person described.)

So at least in my family we have people crossing all the official types. Of course people all from one subtype can be put into all the official types, so that would be one way to explain it. But I think we also really do have a lot of variation between us so that I would see some of us as different subtypes. Just not based on which official type we were put into. (I have found what seems to be a minority of autistic people with frightening amounts in common with me, and one interesting thing to me is that we span literally every category of autism as far as how we were diagnosed. While people who share labels with us can differ wildly from our own experiences.)

One parent with an ASD, 50% chance of the kid having it (most parents are of the BAP variety). Two parents with an ASD, 100% chance.

That's the current understanding anyway.

Not always. My two autistic parents produced one NT daughter and one autistic one, and then my mom married again and had an autistic daughter with her NT husband, so an NT as a child of two autistics has happened at least once. (She has strong autistic traits but has never been diagnosable.) And there are the 4-6% of identical twins of autistics who aren't on the spectrum. From those numbers, there must be enough of an epigenetic effect to tip you barely into or out of the spectrum (though there's no guarantee of being NT; you could easily have some other diagnosis).

Talking about "types" of autism doesn't sit well with me, either, considering how poorly they are defined and how much people tend to move between groups. You can talk about GAFs, but those change over your lifetime, and people at the same GAF can be very different and have that rating for different reasons. That the GAF is the most concrete way to talk about functioning levels should say something in and of itself, considering how changeable it is and how many things any given number can represent.

It's not perfect, no, but "they" found that it accounts for most of the cases.

Well, in that statistical thingy they did recently, where they found genetics accounted for almost all cases and it usually followed the 50% rule if one person had it.

One or possibly both of my parents were on the spectrum, I have AS and both my children have brain differences, though one seems to be mild AS and the other has dyscalculia.

I'm not sure, but I'm pleased to have an excuse I can trot out for not having any kids, when the reality is that I just don't want any.

Gorgeous cat in your avatar pic, btw.

Oh and I have one nonautistic brother but he has other unusual neurological traits so I can't call him NT (I wouldn't call someone with autistic traits NT either, and he seems to have a small number of those as well, they just aren't obvious to the rest of the family, and my mom has other neurological stuff too... in fact we all do, although I seem to have ended up with the most different forms of neurological crap).

My parents aren't diagnosed with any ASDs but I'm pretty sure my mother is HFA or AS, based on her behavior when she was young. She's got other problems now so it's hard to tell what symptoms are a result of what. She might have some acquired neurological damage. My father has a lot of features but has learned to cope with them. By his descriptions he was probably diagnosable as a kid, so I guess that would put him on the spectrum now as well, even if he can pass for semi-normal but excentric.

I'm diagnosed with AS. I have one sister and three brothers. One of my brothers has OCD and AS-traits, but I don't know him well enough to tell whether he has AS. The fact that he's kind of oblivious to people's feelings and always talks a lot about his interests and never about people indicates it though. He also had no friends growing up and was pretty much happy that way. For a few years he hardly spoke, just isolated himself with his hobbies and occasionally came out for food. My youngest brother has some tendencies, but from what I can tell he has pretty good social radar, which probably means he's not on the spectrum, he might be BAP. My other two siblings are both socially gifted, empathic people with large circuits of friends. So to summarize:

Two AS parents (or one BAP, one AS) 5 kids out of which probably 2 have ASDs.

I have to kids with an NT, one has atypical autism/HFA, the other is NT.