I am a pediatric audiologist in independent practice, and in the course of my job I test the hearing of children who are behind in their speech and language development. I have been doing this job for 25 years. I am usually the first stop along the chain of evaluations, which are started — usually before school age — because *something is not right* about the child. I can tell you firsthand that the numbers of kids that I see who show signs of autism spectrum disorders has risen *dramatically*.
Formerly, most of the kids I saw had middle ear problems that were muffling their hearing — they were otherwise very typical. Nowadays every other child I see is inattentive to conversation, playing inapropriately with an object in the room, avoiding eye contact — basically disengaged from the world of communication. I have no incentive to “diagnose” these kids — I just test their hearing and write a report.
It used to be that the hardest part of my job was telling a parent that their child was deaf. Now *by far* the hardest part is telling these parents that their child has normal hearing. At that point they usually break down, knowing that the alternative that is left is much harder to “fix”. These are parents from all walks of life — not only well-heeled parents, but Mexican immigrants who had never heard the word “autism” before some doctor mentioned it offhandedly. Don’t tell me that the only thing that’s changed is the label.
