As a Special Education major, I am constantly looking for any excuse to do research on any type of disability. I choose to find out how autism affects children in their earliest years of life in school. According to the Autism Society of American website (www.autism-society.org), autism is a disability that affects the development of children. This is a complex disorder that appears during the first three years of life. With the rate of autism growing, more autistic children will be place in childcare and preschools. This is why people need to understand the affects of learning and development with autistic children.
"Infantile autism is a behavior condition in young children that takes the form of avoidance of people, inattention, self-stimulatory and repetitious behavior, low interest in play, and delays in language- (www.unr.edu). The disorder and its behaviors is estimated to happen to two to six children in every thousand. The rate of autism is growing to ten to seventeen percent per year. At this rate, there will be at least one million children with autism in the year 2010 (www.autism-society.org). Autism is four times more likely to occur in boys than in girls. There are no racial, ethnic, or social boundaries with this disability, and family income, lifestyle, and education levels have no affect on the number of children diagnosis (http://dev.triothinkquest.org).
The first description of autism was in 1943 by Leo Kanner in the paper entitled "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact- (Mesibov, Adams, and Klinger, 1997). He believed at first that autism was present from birth and coined the term early infantile autism. Later he decided that children with the same disability had a few years of normal development before autistic tendencies started (Wing, 1985). This is the reason why autism is referred to as infantile autism sometimes. .
Characteristics and Causes.
Even since Kanner, people have been trying to find out more and more about autism.
