Resources for Parents
Practical information for parents researching autism, children's health, biomedical approaches, environmental health, gut health, heavy metals, and chelation.
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 Having an autistic child can sometimes feel like you're trying to solve ten different problems at once. Maybe your child has difficulty communicating, but also doesn't sleep. Maybe there are digestive problems, extremely restricted eating, sensory sensitivities, anxiety, irritability, frequent illness, or other ongoing health concerns. You may find yourself wondering: Are all of these things just part of autism? Or could there be other health issues worth investigating? That was a question we eventually had to ask ourselves. We learned that it was important to look at our child's health as a whole rather than treating every symptom as a completely separate problem. An Autism Diagnosis Doesn't Tell You Everything About a Child's Health An autism diagnosis can help explain certain developmental and behavioral characteristics, but it doesn't necessarily explain every health problem a child experiences. A child can have autism and constipation. Autism and significant sleep problems. Autism and nutritional concerns. Autism and anxiety. Autism and sensory problems. Autism and other medical or environmental concerns. The important point isn't to assume that one of these problems explains autism. It's to recognize that a child can have legitimate health problems that deserve attention regardless of the autism diagnosis. When several problems are happening at the same time, it can be useful to step back and look at the bigger picture. Start With What You're Actually Seeing Before trying to figure out why something is happening, start by documenting what is happening. Think about your child's health as a timeline. Ask yourself:
You don't need to have an explanation for any of these things yet. You're gathering information. That information can become much more useful when you start looking for patterns. Look Beyond Development and Behavior When a child has communication or developmental difficulties, it's easy for everything else to get viewed through that lens. A child who cannot explain that their stomach hurts may become irritable or have a meltdown. A child who isn't sleeping may have much more difficulty regulating their behavior during the day. A child with significant food restrictions may have nutritional concerns. A child with sensory sensitivities may struggle with eating, clothing, hygiene, school, or everyday activities. A child who cannot easily communicate discomfort may express that discomfort through changes in behavior, sleep, appetite, or mood. This doesn't tell you what caused the problem, but it does give you a reason to ask whether there is something else going on that deserves attention. Pay Attention to Sleep Sleep was one of the areas that became impossible for us to ignore. If your child isn't sleeping well, look at the problem itself rather than simply accepting poor sleep as another autism symptom. Consider:
Sleep problems can have many possible causes, so the goal isn't to jump to one explanation. The goal is to recognize that chronic sleep problems are a health issue worth investigating. Pay Attention to Digestion Digestive problems are another area that can easily become part of the background when a child has multiple challenges. Look at things such as:
For a child who cannot communicate clearly, digestive discomfort may not look like a child saying, “My stomach hurts.” It may look like irritability, disrupted sleep, refusal to eat, increased sensory behaviors, or changes in behavior. That doesn't mean those behaviors prove that a digestive problem exists. It means that physical symptoms deserve to be considered when trying to understand changes in a child's behavior. Look at Eating and Nutrition Many autistic children have highly restricted diets. Sometimes the restriction is related to texture or sensory sensitivity. Sometimes there are a small number of foods a child will accept. Sometimes eating becomes increasingly difficult because of digestive problems or other factors. When the list of accepted foods becomes very short, it's reasonable to ask: Is my child getting the nutrition they need? Look at:
This doesn't mean every autistic child needs a complicated supplement program. It means nutrition deserves to be looked at as part of the child's overall health. Look at Sensory and Behavioral Changes Sensory sensitivities can affect nearly every part of daily life. A child may be extremely sensitive to:
Sometimes parents become so accustomed to these behaviors that they stop noticing changes. That's why it can be useful to ask: Is this how my child has always been, or has something changed? The same applies to behavior. If a normally calm child suddenly becomes extremely irritable, starts having frequent meltdowns, becomes aggressive, stops sleeping, or begins engaging in new behaviors, don't automatically assume that the behavior is simply a new manifestation of autism. A significant change is information. It may have many possible explanations, but it is worth paying attention to. What About Development and Regression? Developmental history matters too. Some children experience a noticeable loss of skills after developing normally for a period of time. Other children don't have a clear regression. They may have developmental delays from very early in life and struggle to gain skills as expected. Both histories are important. If your child has lost skills, document what changed and when. If your child has always struggled developmentally, document that too. Look at communication, social interaction, motor skills, play, learning, sleep, eating, and behavior over time. You don't need a dramatic regression for there to be important information in your child's developmental history. When Several Areas Are Affected, Look for Connections Once you have documented what's happening, you can start asking whether some of the problems seem to interact. For example: Poor sleep → daytime behavior A child who sleeps poorly may have a much harder time functioning and regulating emotions during the day. Digestive problems → eating A child experiencing digestive discomfort may become increasingly selective about food. Sensory sensitivities → restricted eating A child who cannot tolerate certain textures, smells, or temperatures may have an extremely limited diet. Restricted eating → nutrition A very limited diet can make it more difficult to meet nutritional needs. Physical discomfort → behavior A child who cannot communicate pain or discomfort may express it through behavior instead. These connections don't necessarily identify the original cause, but they can help you understand why several problems may need to be considered together. Could Environmental Exposures Be Part of the Picture? Once we started looking at the bigger picture, we also began asking what our children had actually been exposed to. Environmental exposure is a broad subject. Depending on the circumstances, children can encounter chemicals and metals through things such as food, water, air, household products, pesticides, building materials, consumer products, and other sources. Not every exposure is significant. And finding a potential exposure doesn't prove that it caused a child's symptoms. But understanding exposure history can help you ask a more specific question: Is there an exposure that gives us a reason to investigate further? That question eventually led us to learn much more about heavy metals, including mercury. Our article What Are Environmental Toxins? A Parent's Guide to Common Exposure goes into more detail about this area. Why Heavy Metals Became Part of Our Investigation Heavy metals eventually became one of the areas we wanted to understand more carefully. We began learning about:
Having multiple symptoms did not prove that our children had heavy-metal toxicity. Instead, heavy metals became one specific area of investigation within a much larger picture. We wanted to understand what exposure meant, where exposure could come from, how testing was approached, and what the different opinions about chelation actually involved. That research eventually led us to the work of Andy Cutler and the Frequent-Dose Chelation Protocol. If you're beginning to investigate this area, start with our article Heavy Metals and Autism: What Parents Should Know About Exposure and Testing. You Don't Have to Find One Explanation for Everything One of the biggest mistakes parents can make is feeling that they have to find one answer that explains every symptom. Health isn't always that simple. A child can have several problems at the same time, and one problem can contribute to another. Some symptoms may be related while others may be completely independent, and sometimes you may investigate something and discover that it isn't the explanation you expected. That's okay. The goal is not to force every symptom into one theory. The goal is to identify the problems, understand them, and determine which ones deserve further investigation. A Simple Place to Start Looking at the bigger picture was what eventually led us to explore several areas of health that we had previously considered separately.
You can explore those areas here: Gut health: Gut Health in Autism and the Gut-Brain Connection: What Parents Should Knowgut-health-gut-brain-connection.html Environmental exposures: What Are Environmental Toxins? A Parent's Guide to Common Exposure Heavy metals: Heavy Metals and Autism: What Parents Should Know About Exposure and Testing Biomedical approaches: What Are Biomedical Approaches to Autism? A Parent's Introduction Chelation: What Is the Andy Cutler Frequent-Dose Chelation Protocol? A Parent's Guide And if you're trying to understand how these different subjects fit together, rather than researching each one independently, you can learn more about Fight Autism and Win. Comments are closed.
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