Will my brother have an autistic child?

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Hey all -- new to Wrong Planet. This question might be addressed somewhere else -- apologies if I missed it. Now, I have Asperger's. I'm on the "no" side of the fence on having children, but my NT brother is not -- he's likely to start soon. Our father has Asperger's tendencies but has no diagnosis. How likely is it that my brother (NT though he is) will have an autistic child? It would never hold him back from having children, nor should it, but he needs to be on the look-out.

If my sister had an autistic child, I'd love that child like my very own.

It's probably a higher chance than the general population but that doesn't necessarily mean it's highly likely.

I'd say there's a higher chance, but that makes it far from inevitable. My daughter is the only child dx with ASD out of 11 grandchildren; we suspect that my father and most of his 5 offspring have some autistic traits, but nothing dx.
One very positive aspect of having members of one's extended family with ASD (or any other challenge) is that the sense of being different or alien seems easier to cope with. If your brother's child does turn out to be ASD, your moral support will be very helpful.
You could also reassure your brother that more supports are available in the past.
J.

My daughter doesn't have it, nor my sister (though she is dyslexic).

One out of my sister's three kids has been diagnosed PDD-NOS.

On my Dad's side, out of four cousins, one has been diagnosed with AS.

So it tends to pop up along hereditary lines, but not in any reliable or predictable pattern.

I must admit, however, if your choice not to have kids is just a choice not to have kids, that's certainly your business.

If, however, you are making that choice specifically to avoid bringing another one of US into the world, that I would find highly offensive. Its the same logic that, given a prenatal test for autism, would abort any fetus that tested positive for the possibility of an autism spectrum disorder. That kind of thinking could easily deprive the world of the next Albert Einstein (whom experts now believe was almost certainly an Aspergian himself). People who think and function differently than the norm are not freaks and malformed monsters to be eradicated from the gene pool. We may be somewhat awkward in our abilities to function in the same glib, facile social circles as the neurotypical crowd, but that hardly means we have nothing of value to contribute to the world.

"Life is like a box of chocolates--you never know just what you're gonna get."

No one knows if your brother is going to have an autistic child until the child is born. ASD is genetic, so there is a higher chance to have an ASD child when there are close ASD relatives. That doesn't mean you/he will have an ASD child. My grandfather, I am pretty sure, would have qualified for ASD. None of his kids have one (though a couple are probably BAP). I have autism. None of my first cousins do. My nephew does though. It can skip generations. Some people have one autistic kid and the rest NT. Some people have all autistic kids. Some people have none. There is no way of knowing until the kids are alive. Two NT parents can have an autistic child; two autistic parents can have an NT child. It is not something that can truly be accurately predicted.

Last edited by littlelily613 on 11 Sep 2011, 8:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That is very well put Lily.

I also have sporadic family presence of autism, I have AS one of my three siblings has autism, one of my cousins has a little girl was just diagnosed with autism. Both my parents come from reasonably big families and I have a lot of cousins. There are a lot more not on the spectrum than on it, even though a few have some interesting sub-clinical traits. I also have an aunt and cousin with inattentive ADHD which is sometimes barrelled in with autism. So all in all at most like a 15 percent presence or something like that in my family.