Fathermucker by Greg Olear Page B

feed and sleep and poop, and you chill the fuck out at playdates.
    Gloria is a SAHM. That makes Haven a Son of SAHM.
    And it makes me SAHD.

Friday, 9:26 a.m.
    A UTISM IS A GROWTH INDUSTRY . F IFTEEN YEARS AGO, ONE IN TWO thousand children was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder; now it is one in 170, and the numbers keep increasing every year.
    No one can adequately explain this unprecedented surge. The consensus is that autistic spectrum disorders are caused mostly by genetic factors—although what those factors are and how they are passed on remain anyone’s guess—triggered by changes in the environment. These environmental triggers are just as murky as the genetic factors. Exposure to mercury, lead, Thiomersal, Tylenol, pesticides, ultrasound; deficiencies in vitamin D, in folic acid, in female hormones; complications from “leaky gut” syndrome, viral infection, fetal testosterone, thyroid disorders, gestational diabetes; age of the mother, age of the father, stress, depression, even rain—rain!—have been bandied about as environmental triggers of autism.
    When one of these theories finds legs, parents of autistic children hop on the bandwagon. We want to believe that autism is caused by sonograms, by heavy metals in the drinking water, by noxious additives in MMR vaccines, by undetectable by-products in plastic containers, by chocolate shakes from McDonalds—by something external, something tangible, something upon which we can heap blame. This is why the vaccine theory became so popular in the nineties. It made intuitive sense (autism rears its antisocial head around age three, roughly coinciding with the first MMR inoculations), it was refuted by the mainstream media (it’s a conspiracy!), it fed into Gen-X skepticism of modern medicine (we’re injecting our kids with poison! This must be stopped!), and it was adopted as a cause célèbre by the rubber-faced goofball who lit his farts on fire in Dumb and Dumber . Never mind that the theory had as much statistical heft as the “Nigerien yellowcake” case for WMDs in Iraq. We still haven’t found the nukes in the Babylonian desert, or the cause of the autism spike.
    Cambridge University autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen—it’s hard not to picture him as Borat; Sacha is, in fact, his cousin—is the author of the “extreme male brain” theory of autism. Men, as we know from decades of scientific (and millennia of anecdotal) evidence, are not as strong as women with respect to relating to other people (if you’re an Eat, Pray, Love –reading manhater, feel free to replace “relating to” with “giving a shit about” in the preceding sentence). This is hard-wired, apparently, from the days when we had to bludgeon cute animals to death before ripping them apart and feasting on their bloody innards, a process which, while necessary for survival, can be traumatic if you feel sympathy for the cute animal in question. Baron-Cohen calls this ability to interrelate—“the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with appropriate emotion”— empathizing . Generally speaking, testosterone is to empathizing what a bottle of Jim Beam is to driving. What men are good at is what Baron-Cohen terms systemizing —“the drive to analyze or construct systems that follow rules.” This is why, if you need to repair a wireless router, or change your oil, or build an aqueduct, the person whose aid you enlist tends to have a Y chromosome. If men are, generally speaking, strong systemizers and so-so empathizers, autistics are uncannily strong systemizers ( hyper-systemizers , in Baron-Cohen’s jargon) and extremely deficient empathizers. The inability to discern what other people are thinking, feeling, implying, and so forth, Baron-Cohen calls mind-blindness .
    Roland has Asperger’s syndrome, not autism