Age of dads in Poll form

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Let's see, 58 - 23 = 35?

Well, Grandma-in-law would have been in her late 20's when she had her daughter. Grandpa was schizophrenic, supposedly due to a war injury.

or do you mean maternal grandmothers? I wouldn't know that.

My father was in his 40's when I was born.

My dad was 35 when I was born, I am AS and my son is also, but I was only 25 when he was born.

My dad was in the 25-30 bracket think it was 29 not certain though.

he was 21.

The poll would work better if each bracket had a set containing the same number of elements. The "31-39" bracket spans a 50% larger range than the "25-30" bracket, so it would show a larger number of hits regardless, assuming an otherwise roughly uniform distribution.

To make it really interesting, find the distribution of the ages of fathers across the entire population, and then compare it to the distribution you're researching here. I'd be interested to see the results myself.

My paternal grandfather was 42 when he first started having kids....but there are some pretty AS-traits that seem to come from his side of the family anyway.

One thing I was thinking about which could affect the correlation they found between father's ages and the risk of autism is that there tends to be a higher rate of parents with advanced educations (Masters, PhDs, MDs) than in the general population. And aside from these advanced educations taking more time to complete and then get started in a career, many couples may simply be more married to their careers, especially early off. So by the time the clock starts running down, they only have time for one child (decreasing the chances they'll have a multiple autism incidence family).

Also, in couples, males are often older than females (not always, but often). So by the time they have children, the male of the couple may have reached that 40+ mark while the female may not have.

Plus, if there is an increased risk of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (as proffered by Baron-Cohen's team), then this could affect fertility and number of children (PCOS is the #1 cause of infertility in women). For my mother, it wasn't until 14 years after they married that they finally had me and she had to have some fertility treatment.

If she hadn't needed treatment, who knows, I might've had a whole slew of siblings and they'd've had children younger.

And finally, with our poorer social skills, it may simply take us longer to find a mate and settle down (if we ever do).

Those were a few of the possibilities I thought of which could be affecting the correlation.

my dad was 33 yrs old when i was born, my mother 30.

My father was 31 then (he turned 32 some months later that year).

Well, a larger bracket is "under 25" because technically a very young teen can father a child, but for the purposes of looking at demographics, I picked what I picked. I mostly wanted "very young", "not young", "getting older", "older than 40". "Older than 40" is the age that the famed Israeli study noted with the disproportionately high number of autistic offspring.

My parents were both 40 when I was born.