Jack is autistic.1 He loves video games, rarely speaks, insists on wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt every day, and has difficulty maintaining peer relationships. Jill is autistic as well. A talented artist, she becomes very anxious when confronted with minor changes in routines. She often fails to recognize her own hunger or exhaustion, and she sometimes makes animal sounds in public places. A photograph of someone like Jill is unlikely to appear on the homepage of a local chapter of the Autism Society of America. A movie screenplay about someone like Jack is unlikely to entice Hollywood producers. Because Jack and Jill are autistic adults, rather than autistic children, they face an additional barrier: invisibility.

During the recent decade of unprecedented autism "awareness," the disability of autism has been infantilized. Autism is so predominantly considered a childhood disability that some autism "advocates" claim that autistic adults do not even exist (Kirby, 2005; Wright, 2008). In 2008, the most prominent U.S. autism charity, Autism Speaks, reported on its website an estimate of the number of "autistic people." That estimate was identical to their estimate of the number of "autistic children," thereby denying the existence of any autistic adults (Dawson, 2008). The founder of Autism Speaks, Suzanne Wright (2008), even wondered aloud, "Where are all the 50-year-old autistic people?" Wright's question was not a new one. As early as 2001, the cofounder of SafeMinds (a "private nonprofit organization founded to investigate and raise awareness of the risks to infants and children of exposure to mercury from medical products, including thimerosal in vaccines"; SafeMinds, 2010) denounced the existence of significant numbers of autistic adults in a letter submitted to British Medical Journal (Seidel, 2006). Writing in the Huffington Post, author David Kirby (2005) also claimed autistic adults did not exist.

In this empirically based essay, we examine several manifestations of the infantilization of autism, including the depiction of autism as a child-bound disability by parents, charitable organizations, the popular media, and the news industry. Although the infantilization of autism arises from the age-old exploitation of children as tools of pity and the 21st-century marketing of autism as a new phenomenon, we argue the infantilization of autism is perpetuated by a cyclical interaction between parent-driven autism societies, autism fundraising charities, and mass media portrayals via the entertainment and news industries.

Manufacturing pity through depictions of disabled children is nothing new and is certainly not unique to autism. The paternalistic "poster child" concept continues to be exemplified by the Muscular Dystrophy Association's annual telethon hosted by Jerry Lewis, who refers to adults and children alike as his "kids," while dismissing the criticisms of self-advocates with quips such as, "If you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple, stay in your house" (Ervin, 2009). Adults with disabilities in general, and those with developmental disabilities in particular, have long been treated as childlike entities, deserving fewer rights and incurring greater condescension than adults without disabilities. The stereotype of the "eternal child" has burned a disturbing path through history and continues to wreak havoc in arenas ranging from employment discrimination to forced sterilizations (Osburn, 2009; Pfeiffer, 1994; Wolfensberger, 1972).

The infantilization of autism stems in part from this sordid history, but also arises from features unique to the development of the concept of autism. Increases in the number of individuals diagnosed with autism, due primarily to changes in diagnostic criteria that occurred in the 1990s, have been grossly misinterpreted as an autism epidemic (Gernsbacher, 2008; 2009; Gernsbacher, Dawson, & Goldsmith, 2005). Many of the most frightening (and erroneous) claims of a so-called autism epidemic have been made by charitable organizations to fuel their marketing campaigns. For instance, one charity's depiction of autism as a national emergency akin to mass kidnapping (e.g., Mergenthaler, 2009) undoubtedly was purposed to exploit parents' fears. Simply acknowledging that autistic adults exist in numbers equal to that of autistic children would jeopardize this rickety platform for fear-based fundraising.

Many parents of autistic children also perpetuate the myth of the non-existence of autistic adults. In doing so, parents become the de facto spokespersons for the disability, displacing the adults who actually experience the disability. Parents then appropriate the majority of rhetoric about autism, and, with ample media reinforcement, the discourse revolves around only children. To examine empirically the hypothesis that society infantilizes autism, we analyzed the role played by parents, as well as those played by charitable organizations, the popular media, and the news industry.