My best friend, the one who introduced me to LLL in 1979, and served as my
main role model for attachment parenting, the one who went 36 months without
menstruating after the birth of her first child ---- had a second child who
was also totally breastfed, fed on demand, slept with his parents, the whole
9 yards, and didn't wean til sometime after 6 years (I stopped asking), and
he has a quite involved case of autism.  He doesn't talk at all, is still in
diapers at 9 years of age, and is quite mobile, coordinated, and strong, but
with no "mind" behind it to direct his energy.  They live in a "fortress" to
keep him from getting up on the roof, over the fence, etc.  He *does* allow
a lot of physical contact, which his mother attributes to the long-term
breastfeeding.  The doctors think his autism is the result of an unnoticed
viral infection she had during her 4th month of pregnancy.

I think we must be wary of "thinking anecdotally" and remember to think
"epidemiologically."  I have heard that there was a recent study linking
bottlefeeding to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but have not seen
it.  But once again, remember that just because your child has something
known to be more common in bottle-fed kids doesn't mean that *his* case was
CAUSED by bottle-feeding in any direct way.  You'll never know.

There was a case in West Texas some years ago where a community had 8
children with Down Syndrome under the age of 10 or something, where you
would have predicted only 4 based on the number of births.  The CDC
investigated to see if the high frequency of Down Syndrome children could be
linked to environmental pollutants from some industry and decided they
couldn't tell one way or another.  One of the mothers was interviewed in the
paper, and was suing the polluting company and insisting that her child
*only* had Down Syndrome because of the environmental pollution.  I wanted
to shake her and ask her how she could be so sure her child wasn't one of
the 4 who would have been expected to have Down Syndrome anyway, and *what
difference did it make anyway?*.  Her child DID have Down Syndrome.  Did she
love him?  Was she angry at God?  At the company?  Calm down, geesh, and get
off your soap box and go watch Annie Hall on TV and *lighten up*.

Sorry.


Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
e-mail to [log in to unmask]