There seems little doubt that autism is on the rise.
How convenient it would be if we could show that the changes here from the early eighties corresponds to a change in the use ( direction ) of baby buggies and prams. I see more and more forward facing buggies but that maybe just the part of London in which I live.
What amazes me is that mothers or child carers allow themselves to sustain the bad practice.
It seems that forward facing buggies have been around for over a century but the imagery from my youth was that prams were always parent facing.
The first baby buggy by Maclaren went on sale in 1967 http://bit.ly/2fgRbxK and though it might be stretching the imagination a bit to correlate the take off in the use of buggies at this point to what must have been the beginning of the beginning of the rise in autism mentioned above I think it would be wrong to ignore it altogether.
Consistently I notice forward facing infants straining backwards to see their parent or carer, or ‘shut up’ by having some food put in their mouth or escaping the world at large by sleeping. If its not one of these scenarios I see an infant with a distressed look on its face.
It seems so intuitive, so utterly natural and logical to have one's infant in constant view thus serving all the modalities of sight, hearing, touch, smell and that vital one of seeing that the infant is not in some serious situation like a coughing fit, even choking - events that cannot be seen from a forward facing disposition nor heard either in a rowdy or very noisy place. Foreward facing the infant is denied visual, auditory, tactile, olefactory interaction with its mother or carer and this is absurd.
