Getting babies, parents and
families, back on track.

Autistic Spectrum Disorder Treatment Research

Caregiver and Baby Attunement
Caregiver attunement results from the combination of the baby’s and caregiver’s characteristics. Inadequate parenting (poor attunement) could be because of the baby’s perception capacities or deficits.

For example: a baby that cannot quickly process the information coming from the senses, will feel that the caregiver is inadequate because he cannot clearly perceive them. If each time the baby only sees the mother’s eyes or only the mouth or only the ear, then it is not easy for the baby to form a calming and whole picture of the person soothing them.

Typically the parents are not to blame because the personal make up autistic children doesn't make them easy to understand. The overall outcome is delayed mental development and slow growth.

Research Findings
The speed of physical development of infants’ brains (how fast synapses are added to neurons) may be ranked as “Slow” (bottom 10%), “Normal” (middle 80%) and “Fast” (top 10%). In the same way, the effectiveness of a caregiver’s attunement with an infant may be ranked as “Inadequate” (bottom 10%), “Normal” (middle 80%) and “Fast” (top 10%).

The effectiveness of a caregivers’ attunement with an infant is impacted by many variables including the environment (stressful or not) and personal preferences (likes babies or not, available or not) and the ability of the baby to clearly perceive his environment. The matrix below displays a continuum for these two circumstances, infant brain development speed and caregiver attunement, as the axis.


The Perfect Storm
Research shows that the “perfect storm” of circumstances likely to lead to Autism is the combination of fast (top 10%) infant brain development and inadequate caregiver attunement with the infant. What happens is that the quickly developing infant brain is starved for the stimulation the child needs to develop normally and, as a result, it partially shuts down. In other words, a portion of the millions of new synapses are exposed to the requisite stimulation, but many are not. The result is autistic symptoms. For more information about early brain developent click here.