 Update on autism and divorceby Benison O'Reilly on Thursday, August 5th, 2010We’re moving to a bigger and better site! Just not yet. Seana and I are working on our new standalone blogspot for the AAH. We’ve got it up and running, but it still needs lots of work. We’re also planning to move all our old posts over to the new site’s archives, which will take a while, so expect it to be up and running in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I stumbled across this report of another study on autism and divorce. Back in May I reported on a study that found that the rate of divorce between parents of kids with ASDs did not differ significantly from the divorce rate for parents of typically developing children, exploding that old 80% divorce rate mythology. This new study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, and reported in the LA Times is less encouraging. Researchers investigated 391 families participating in the Adolescents and Adults with Autism study and compared them with other demographically similar families whose children were developing typically. The divorce rate among couples raising a child with an ASD was nearly twice as high as the rate for the control families (23.5% vs 14%). The risk of divorce was higher for families that had one or more older siblings in addition to the child with ASD (which unfortunately exactly describes my situation, although last time I checked my husband and I were still talking!) , although interestingly not for families who had more than one child with an ASD, or a more severely affected child with autism. This suggests that ASDs may add some additional strain to marriages-an unsurprising finding-but in this study 75% of ASD marriages remained intact, which suggests the odds are still in our favour. One Response to “Update on autism and divorce”Leave a Reply |
Sounds like a fabulous idea and I blog I will most definitely want to follow {I’ve actually just spent the past 10 minutes hunting to see if it existed!}. I am yet to finish your AAH book but loving it so far. Thank you very much x
On the topic of divorce in families experiencing ASD, I’m a firm believer that the whole ASD experience merely ‘finds the cracks’ in marriage rather than creates new ones. Interesting stats and I’m glad to hear they are not as high as 80% – a figure constantly being quoted to us.