Parents of children with autism earn 14% less than parents of children without autism says an article in this month’s Pediatrics magazine. This statistic is based on surveying the parents of 11, 000 children with autism whose ages are between kindergarten and 8th grade.

Comparing the parents with other parents of comparable careers, the survey found that on average a household with a child with autism makes $6200 per year less. Remember these are averaged statistics.

The researchers believe this income discrepancy (income, not outlay for treatments) is due to parents altering their work arrangements or choosing to stay in jobs and locations for less pay due to the child’s needs. I believe that parents deciding to cut back work hours, give up fulltime jobs or stop working altogether probably accounts for much of this income gap.

Nothing in this survey addresses the huge expense of autism on these same families, as many treatments and therapies are not covered by insurance and school systems often fall short in providing therapies that help these children in a learning environment. So many families find themselves with less income and larger expenses.

A 2006 study at the University of Rochester showed that annual out-of-pocket medical and educational expenses for families with a child with autism average around $11,000. This is no surprise to those of us calculating up our medical expenses at tax time and finding that we more than qualify for a medical deduction, even though the medical expenses much exceed 7% of your gross income. For parents of autistic children, they almost always do.

But the $17,000 year net loss to most families of autism is only the partial “cost” that can be attributed to autism. According to a 2006 study by the Harvard School of Public Health, a person with autism in the U.S. can cost society about $3.2 million over his/her lifespan. Couple that figure with the fact that now 1 out of 150 children have autism, and you can see that this epidemic has severe financial ramifications for more than just our families. The health care and educational systems of this country are bound to be severely affected.

And these large figures are likely to be an underestimate, according to the study’s chief researcher, Michael Ganz:

“Given that the federal autism research budget has been historically less than $100 million per year and given that research budgets for other conditions with similar numbers of affected individuals are sometimes orders of magnitude higher, I hope that my research can help focus more attention on directing more resources toward finding prevention and treatment options for autism,” Ganz said. (For comparison purposes, he notes estimated annual costs of other conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease ($91 billion); mental retardation ($51 billion); anxiety ($47 billion); and schizophrenia ($33 billion).)

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