Many years ago, I joined an online mums’ group. We were all expecting babies around the same time and, like many new parents, shared everything from sleepless nights and feeding dramas to first words, first steps and school milestones.
As the years passed, life naturally took us in different directions. Some members remained active on Facebook while others quietly disappeared. Every now and then, however, I would see an update from one of the mums and notice something interesting.
A surprisingly large number of the children had been diagnosed as autistic.
I’m not talking about one or two children.
I mean enough for me to repeatedly stop scrolling and think, “That seems unusually high.”
Now, I’m fully aware that one Facebook group is hardly the gold standard of research, but it was interesting enough to send me down a rabbit hole. If autism is supposedly uncommon, why did so many children from one relatively small group seem to have received a diagnosis?
The more I thought about it, the more fascinating the question became.
Maybe Autism Was Always There
The first thing I realised is that we may be asking the wrong question altogether.
Perhaps autism is not suddenly appearing everywhere. Perhaps we are simply much better at recognising it than previous generations were.
When I was growing up, autism was often viewed through a very narrow lens. Most people imagined someone with significant support needs who clearly struggled in everyday life. If a child was intelligent, spoke well, attended mainstream school and managed to get through life reasonably successfully, autism was rarely considered.
Instead, people were described as eccentric, shy, awkward, obsessive, difficult, blunt or simply a bit odd.
Every family seemed to have an uncle who collected obscure facts, a grandparent who hated change, or a relative who disappeared whenever social gatherings became overwhelming. Nobody thought much of it at the time because these traits were viewed as personality quirks rather than possible signs of neurodivergence.
Looking back with modern knowledge, it is hard not to wonder how many people would receive a very different explanation today.
The Family Tree Effect
One of the strongest arguments for autism being hereditary is the number of families who seem to uncover a hidden pattern once a child receives a diagnosis.
The story often follows a familiar path.
A child is diagnosed.
The parents begin researching.
One parent suddenly recognises themselves in the descriptions.
Then a grandparent starts making sense.
Then a sibling.
Then an aunt, uncle or cousin.
Before long, what initially appeared to be a single diagnosis begins to look more like a family trait that nobody had the language to identify previously.
This is why I always smile when people say there is no autism in their family.
Sometimes that may be true.
However, many times what they actually mean is that nobody has ever been formally diagnosed.
Those are two very different things.
Do Neurodivergent People Accidentally Find Each Other?
This is the part that I find particularly intriguing.
Most of us like to think our friendships develop randomly. In reality, people tend to gravitate towards others who feel familiar. We often connect with people who share similar communication styles, interests, humour and ways of seeing the world.
What if neurodivergent people naturally find one another without realising it?
A woman with autistic traits may feel comfortable around another woman with similar traits, even if neither has ever considered the possibility of being autistic. The same may apply to ADHD, dyslexia and other forms of neurodivergence.
Researchers even have a term for this phenomenon when it occurs in relationships. It is called assortative mating, which is simply a fancy way of saying that people with similar characteristics often end up together.
If several members of my old mums’ group happened to have neurodivergent traits themselves, the number of neurodivergent children within the group suddenly becomes far less surprising.
What initially looks like a coincidence may not be a coincidence at all.
The Environmental Debate
Of course, no discussion about autism would be complete without mentioning environmental factors.
This is often where conversations become heated because people tend to sit firmly in one camp or the other.
Some believe autism is almost entirely genetic.
Others believe environmental influences play a significant role.
The truth is that researchers continue to investigate a wide range of possibilities including parental age, pregnancy complications, premature birth and various prenatal factors. While some associations have been identified, no single environmental factor has emerged that explains the increase in autism diagnoses we have seen over recent decades.
At present, genetics remains the strongest explanation.
That does not mean environmental influences are impossible. It simply means that the evidence currently points far more strongly towards inherited traits.
Maybe We Are Looking at This Backwards
The longer I sat with this question, the more I wondered whether the real mystery is not why there seem to be so many autistic children.
Perhaps the bigger mystery is how many autistic adults have gone through life completely unidentified.
Think about how many people grew up in generations where autism was barely discussed. Many learned to mask, adapt and survive without ever understanding why they felt different from everyone around them.
Now their children are being assessed and diagnosed, and suddenly the family history begins to make much more sense.
The children are not necessarily the first autistic people in the family.
They may simply be the first generation to receive answers.
So Who Is Actually Neurotypical?
This is the thought that always makes me chuckle.
The more people I meet, the more difficult it becomes to believe that humanity fits neatly into two boxes labelled neurotypical and neurodivergent.
Most of us know someone with autistic traits.
Most of us know someone with ADHD.
Many families contain multiple neurodivergent relatives spread across several generations.
The more closely you look, the more common these traits seem to become.
Of course, neurodivergent does not mean rare. It simply means differing from the statistical majority. Yet I cannot help wondering whether future generations will look back and be surprised that we ever viewed human brains in such rigid categories.
My old mums’ group certainly did not answer that question.
However, it did leave me with a fascinating observation and a rabbit hole that I am still exploring today.
Have you ever looked around your own family, friendship group or workplace and wondered whether neurodivergence is far more common than we realise?
