The divorce rate of parents with an autistic child is said to be over 80%. If there's any validity to this statistic my guess is, in addition to the stress and financial strain, the legal hoops one must jump through to get ones child basic services with the Board of Education, the Board of Public Transportation, insurance companies, the lawyers, the hearings, the paper work and the sheer bureaucracy of advocating for your child must be a factor. It is the workload equivalent to running a small business if not more. When you add the fact many autistic children have disruptive sleep patterns and eating habits causing further complications to a family already struggling to cope, you have a situation that will test the strength of any marriage, no matter how solid.
This story is one case where the online comments section is actually useful. Three readers have already pointed out that the 80-percent figure is bogus. See an earlier post on a study from the Kennedy Krieger Institute. As another post mentioned, however, parents of adults with autism do seem to have a higher divorce rate.
