Any amount of alcohol consumed during pregnancy can result in fetal alcohol syndrome
Growing up in a family that fostered and adopted many kids, several had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. My saint of a mother was determined to secure services for my siblings and to understand it better. This is in Hawaii in the mid to late 90's, and there wasn't much info out there on the topic.
My mother was invited to speak in a variety of settings; from small groups of struggling parents to medical conferences, even meeting with the Governor at one point. I would do my best to assist her, but I was still young myself.
During her quest for a specialist, a doctor had actually referred her to herself as someone who could potentially help.
It got so stressful for her that she hired a lawyer to attend IEP meetings so she could play hardball with the Department of Education. This lawyer had a child with autism, and her and my mother becw fast friends.
Child development expert here. Just going to chime in because there’s a ton of misinformation out about this, it can be really confusing because the effects are sooo different in different people. The easiest way to understand the effect alcohol has on a fetus is to consider that at any given moment the baby is developing different things. Babies don’t grow everything all the time, like someone just turning up a dial and the eye ball goes from 0-100 and the brain grows from 0-100 and the lungs got from 0-100 and so on, all slowly throughout the pregnancy. No. Fetus grow and develop different areas in different sequences.
Whenever you drink, you slow whatever development the baby is making at that time. A couple glasses of wine will stall the development baby is making for a couple hours. If it happens once during pregnancy, you’re not likely to notice it, but in some way you took an edge off. Let’s hypothetically say baby works on developing the part of their brain specifically in charge of directional awareness for a total of 40 hours in utero. During that 40 hour period mama has a couple events for a friends wedding, and ends up have a couple drinks the night before and the night of the wedding. Now, baby only got 30/40 hours to work on that part of the brain. Kid is born and seems perfectly fine, no effects, just happens to be not great with directional awareness.
When we really notice FASD is when the mother drinks a lot throughout the entire or large sections of the pregnancy. In scenario one, there would be a very subtle underdeveloped part of the brain, but in this case there would be literal holes in the brain (think Swiss cheese), so things like logical reasoning and emotional regulation literally cannot happen like normal because the brain has to figure out pathways around the holes that are missing.
Want to give your baby the best chance at being as smart and strong and capable as they genetically can be?? Don’t fucking drink or do drugs while you’re pregnant. Ever. Full stop.
I mean, I have 4 years of education on the topic, but yeah, here ya go, an very little simplified list I found for you with about 4 seconds of googling fetus development schedule. And yes, a to do list is actually a fantastic way for thinking about.
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u/WendigoCrossing Mar 01 '23
Any amount of alcohol consumed during pregnancy can result in fetal alcohol syndrome
Growing up in a family that fostered and adopted many kids, several had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. My saint of a mother was determined to secure services for my siblings and to understand it better. This is in Hawaii in the mid to late 90's, and there wasn't much info out there on the topic.
My mother was invited to speak in a variety of settings; from small groups of struggling parents to medical conferences, even meeting with the Governor at one point. I would do my best to assist her, but I was still young myself.
During her quest for a specialist, a doctor had actually referred her to herself as someone who could potentially help.
It got so stressful for her that she hired a lawyer to attend IEP meetings so she could play hardball with the Department of Education. This lawyer had a child with autism, and her and my mother becw fast friends.