A recent study conducted by the researchers at Interactive Autism Network (IAN) Project, a national autism database headquartered at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore suggests that children with Autism usually stray away from safety.
A child's safety is of utmost importance to parents and the fear of that the child may wonder off to unsafe areas is a common fear that grips parents who have children with an autism-spectrum disorder.
A recent study states that children with an autism-spectrum disorder are more likely to wander off from their homes than other normal children. The study was conducted with over 1,200 children with autism. It was found that 46 percent of these children wandered, eloped or bolted from their homes at least once after the age of 4. Another 26 percent of these children went missing for a significant amount of time. In comparison to that, it was found that only 13 percent of the 1,076 non-autism children that took part in another study displayed such behavior.
"Elopement is one of the very few problems in autism that is life-threatening," said pediatrician Paul Law, senior author of the study and director of the Interactive Autism Network (IAN) Project, a national autism database headquartered at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. "It is probably one of the leading, if not the leading, causes of death in children with autism," US Today quoted him saying.
Alison Singer from Scarsdale, New York has a 15-year-old daughter Jodie with autism. Owing to her daughter showing such behavior, she had to install alarms on every door of the house.
"It just got into her head that she wanted it, and she'd head out to get it," said Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, one of several advocacy and research groups that funded the elopement study. "It wouldn't occur to Jodie that the restaurant was closed, that it was the middle of the night, or that it was several miles away or across the highway. (She) doesn't have the cognitive capacity to think about those things."
Cathy Pratt, director of the Indiana Resource Center for Autism at Indiana University who was not involved in the study said, "Alleviating this stress for families requires that physicians, family members, community members, autism professionals and first responders understand the problem and how to respond," she said. The study documents that elopement "has now become a community problem and a health concern."
