Psychologists Once Blamed ‘Refrigerator Moms’ For Their Kids’ Autism
Now discredited, the theory painted mothers of kids with autism spectrum disorders as neglectful and cold.... Between the 1940s and 1960s, mothers of children with autism were dubbed “refrigerator mothers” and characterized as cold, neglectful, and even abusive.
The now discredited theory blamed mothers for “causing” their children’s autism—and stigmatized an entire generation of women struggling to understand and care for children with autism spectrum disorders.
The theory has its roots in statements by Leo Kanner, the first psychiatrist to clearly define autism. In a 1943
paper—the first to define the condition—Kanner described the parents of 11 children with what he called “autistic disturbances of affective contact.” He called them intelligent but obsessive, often documenting their child’s every move in an attempt to diagnose and control their condition, and wrote that “in the whole group, there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers.”
Kanner kept working with children with autism, and three years later he observed that “most of the patients were exposed from the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only…They were kept neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost.”
At the time,
Freudian psychology dominated the medical and cultural landscape, and parents (especially the mother) were thought to be capable of causing and fostering a variety of mental and neurological conditions in their children. Bruno Bettelheim, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, believed in the Freudian model and felt that Kanner’s work strongly suggested that mothers caused autism in their children.
A
Holocaust survivor who spent time in
Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim was director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, a residential facility that treated children who were considered emotionally disturbed. During the 1950s and 1960s, Bettelheim made a name for himself as an autism specialist.
He used his platform to push the “refrigerator mother theory,” theorizing that the condition was primarily caused by neglect. In his view, pathologically aloof parents could trigger autism in their children when they responded to perceived withdrawals of their young children by withholding affection, causing a chain reaction that resulted in a psychological disorder.
To a modern reader, the parents’ behavior may have had a variety of causes. Perhaps the parents were so overwhelmed by caring for a child with autism that they seemed preoccupied to an outside viewer. Perhaps they didn’t express affection to their children in ways that made sense to Kanner and Bettelheim. Or perhaps they themselves were on the autism spectrum.
Bettelheim didn’t conduct medical studies to test his theories, but he did write about them at length. In 1967, he published a popular book called
The Empty Fortress that compared life with “refrigerator mothers” to growing up in a concentration camp. Bettelheim’s personal experiences during the Holocaust and prominence in the media gave him a supposed authority that was hard to refute.
“It is enough that the infant be convinced that his life is run by insensitive, irrational powers who have complete control over his life and death,”
wrote Bettelheim. “Infantile autism is a state of mind that develops in reaction to feeling oneself in an extreme situation, entirely without hope.”
As a result of Bettelheim’s work, mothers found themselves under the microscope when they sought help for their children. Many blamed themselves for “causing” their children’s conditions. Some mothers
protested their portrayal as cold and abusive, but due to the prominence of the theory, “Guilt, shame, and pain accompanied the already challenging day to day experience for parents trying to raise a child with a significant disability,”
write autism experts Raphael Bernier and Jennifer Gerdts.
Eventually, researchers began to realize that the condition is rooted in biology, not parenting, and that its behaviors fall along a spectrum. In the late 1960s, as the refrigerator mother theory gained traction, Kanner began to take a softer view of the parents he had once seen as “cold.” In a 1969 speech, he
told a group of caretakers that “I officially acquit you people as parents.”
https://www.history.com/news/autism-theory-refrigerator-mother
