When you received your child's diagnosis, you probably endured a number of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It may have been difficult to make sense of them at the time until you sorted them out and processed them through. As you learned more about Asperger's Syndrome, some of your thoughts might have begun to crystallize more clearly.

Among these thoughts may have been reflections of the diagnosis as it pertained to you and your own childhood, or that of your spouse. Were there times you endured growing up, or while attending school, that now have meaning? You may find that your child's diagnosis puts into perspective your experiences or makes sense of your spouse's quirks and idiosyncrasies. If your child's differences went unnoticed and undiagnosed until he was in his later childhood years, could it be because no one in your immediate family observed anything unusual about him? Was his way of being already firmly entrenched with your family's typical, ordinary, everyday-life way of being?

These are some of the thoughts you may be pondering, and they are not unusual. This chapter is a resource to mothers and fathers who are beginning to understand that their child's Asperger's Syndrome may be a genetic reflection of his parents.

Could It Be Genetic?

As previously noted, little factual information is known about Asperger's Syndrome. For many, it is an invisible disability because it is so subtle it can go undetected. At present, statistics and other data are sparse, and you may speculate that there are any number of adults with Asperger's living and working in your community who are undiagnosed. One recent theory hypothesizes that certain types of people with “Asperger-like” traits — smart but antisocial — attract one another, leading to such couples bearing children with the same traits, only magnified due to an overload of genes. Dr. Fred Volkmar, a child psychiatrist at Yale University, estimates that Asperger's correlates with a genetic component more apparent than even autism. Dr. Volkmar suggests that about one-third of fathers or brothers of children with Asperger's show signs of Asperger's themselves, and there also appear to be maternal connections as well. This information increases the likelihood that Asperger's may be present in your own family. Think about your child's lineage — are there, or were there, brilliant and creative but blatantly eccentric family members?

Depending upon your personality and the strength of your coping skills, this may be either relieving or disturbing information to consider. If the diagnosis is given and received with a “gloom and doom” mentality, you may lapse into a period of guilt or self-punishment. You may find yourself unjustly bearing the brunt of blame induced by yourself or your spouse. Parents of children with autism do tend to reflect stress tied to anxiety and depression when compared with parents of typical children. But remember, Asperger's is a naturally occurring experience and is no one's fault. Hopefully, this text will empower you to avoid believing negative Asperger's stereotypes in favor of focusing on the positives.

Confronting the Possibility

For Dr. Liane Holliday Willey, author of the book Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger's Syndrome, learning of her daughter's diagnosis was personally liberating because it wasn't until then that she realized she, too, had Asperger's. She defined the experience as reaching the end of a race to be normal. At long last, she embraced self-acceptance and was now in a position to articulate her sensitivities using the framework of Asperger's. Dr. Willey's journey was challenging, but fortunately her husband supported her. Regrettably, not all families handle the experience of recognizing Asperger's in themselves as well as this.

There are those marriages that simply do not sustain well under real or perceived pressures of raising a child with a different way of being. Families of children with Asperger's Syndrome are no exception. Educate and inform yourself and your spouse early on. Connecting with other parents in similar situations can dispel stigmatizing myths and stereotypes.