Katesfan

Good for you. I ate up my parent’s anti vaxx nonsense until this year when I got pregnant myself and really started doing research. It takes a lot to question what you were taught growing up. It took me until I was 30. Glad you found the light sooner.

What are your aspirations?

In my family, about 7-8 relatives (my sister, cousins, and parent’s cousins) believed they saw their children change from speaking, normally developing children into classically autistic children upon receiving their MMR vaccine. Someone had dug up Andrew Wakefield’s discredited study and that’s been gospel ever since.

Now, the rate of autism in my family is definitely high relative to the national rate. When something like this affects the family so deeply, people look for a scapegoat. No one wants to think it’s something in their genes; it needs to be something they can control. I think that’s why they’ve really latched onto the anti-vaccine wagon.

Were their babies ACTUALLY developing normally before their shots, or did the parents just create a reality where they remember a happy, talking baby that really never existed? I can say for sure that my sister’s son was NOT neurotypical before his shots. They were worried about his lack of speech and development way before his shots and autism diagnosis. But once they “connected” his autism with his shots, suddenly everyone remembered a child who was talking, engaging, and totally normal beforehand. But he wasn’t.

Families like mine, who probably have some sort of genetic predisposition to autism, are the anecdotes other anti-vaxxers crave and use to further their agenda. In all honesty, given the stories I’ve heard, I do sympathize with my relatives who are wary of vaccines or toxins or whatever else they think causes autism, because raising an autistic child is objectively more difficult than raising a typical child, and they’d take advantage of anything that they think gave them a choice in the matter.

That’s my family’s story. Hope it’s a little coherent! For the record, I don’t buy their BS and plan to vaccinate my son when he’s born later this year. But like the OP of this AMA I really try to see their side of things, and I do understand why they think the way they do. I just wish they thought differently.

How do you gather your info for your well-informed answers on r/outoftheloop? In other words, how do you seem to know so much!?

We are still social distancing and staying home because we have a newborn. What are some good ways to enrich my 3 year old’s musical experience in the absence of in person music classes and performances? He already likes hammering our keyboard and singing along :)