Autism and drowning — be careful!

After publishing the Father says son’s autism helped save his lifepost last month, I came across another post on the subject — it was on autismparents.net. That post, called Does water rescue downplay autism drowning risks?, has haunted me a bit ever since.

I would hate for any caregiver let their guard down by reading that “children with autism are very much at peace — very relaxed — in the water.” Drowning is the leading cause of death for children with autism!

That info made me wonder if I might have been a bit careless in my post, touting the way Christopher Marino, who has autism, is so comfortable in water that he survived an overnight ordeal in the ocean before being rescued by the Coast Guard. The autismparents.net blogger worries that stories like the one about Christopher Marino might lead people to think that children with autism are born swimmers. He worries parents might think their children with autism are out of harm’s way when near water.

In a post called Drowning among Autistics, the blogger from NTs Are Weird: An Autistic’s View of the World commented on the implication that children with autism were more likely to drown than average children.

… do you know that 1,600 people between 0 and 24 [years of age] drown each year, accidentally, in the U.S.? And if we expect 1 of 150 is autistic, about 11 autistics would drown accidentally each year, in the U.S. alone. That’s extremely sad, and that 1,600 number is a number we can and should do something about — these 1,600 people could have and should have had full lives. But sometimes the focus is lost from the fact that drowning, although very tragic, is not unheard of even in the “normal” population. And there isn’t a lot of evidence that it is more common among autistic people, either.

So I guess the jury is still out, whether or not children with autism are more likely to drown than average children. In the end, the only thing that matters is that we all be careful around water. Take it from Christina Chew. She writes about her son Charlie, who has autism, in a post on autismvox.

Being at the beach, water safety is not just a concern; it’s an every moment necessity. Charlie did a lot more swimming today (more on that later) and I still remember the relief I felt when, at the age of 6, he learned how to swim. This meant that, while still always keeping an eye on him, going to the pool and the beach was a bit (a bit) less nerve-wracking.


 

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