Refridgerator Mothers ????

Post Reply New Topic

I am curious about what ones thoughts are about the theory of "Refridgerator Mothers"

I think the theory was designed by someone who did not want to do any real work and was looking for someone to blame. Similar to today's theory on the MMR Vaccines

My mother was and is still emotionally distant to her children. She has
improved since my sister has a 10yearold and 12 yearold kids.
She visits them occasionally.

But the emotional damage of non-emotionally connecting with her children..
I...born 10/19/66
II....My sister born 4/19/65
III...my 1/2 sister born 1971
IV....my 1/2 sister born 1980

Is always present and brings issues of overcompensating due to the lack
of nuturing years.

I am emotionally needing to connect but don't know how!
My sister is extremely controlling and all is practical
= we don't get a along..."I am her only full brother but that isn't relevant due
to different overcompensations"

My 1st half-sister is a striper and don't care to know about her sex life
(thinking it is like my mothers emotional compensation type)

My 2nd half-sister is in the Navy and doesn't really conncect well with
my mother....as my grandmother once mentioned. and soon as she turned
18 joined theNavy for stability? issues? I want to say she falls into the
spectrum, but don't know her well enough....at 13 was the last time I saw
her and she was quiet and not-expressive.

So as much as others like to put down the refridgerator mom theory...
I say there is some truth to it....since your first contact to the world
is your mother and what she does that creates the future for her
child.

Seems like the concept was based on the theory that AS was psychological "personality" rather then
nuological "brain wiring"...I am still new to AS but I know that I used to think of my mother (adopted)
as being very cold...had no memories of her holding me or playing with me...but,when I recently talked to her about this..she said that I was the "cold" one...that I didnt like being touched and was always into my own "things"????wow,really put a twist in my memories...Maybe there are other mothers who experienced "cold" aspie children(sensory overload,obsessive interests,inability to communicate or read nonverbal cues)who learned to suppress demonstritive effection?I always assumed my issues were due to "attachment disorder" due to my adoption...AS puts a whole new slant on the issue for me.

My theory is that the mothers in question most probably had Aspergers. When I first read that qoute I was horrified, my son had recently been diagnosed with Aspergers, this was over 10yrs ago. Now 10yrs on I understand why one could term mothers as being cold as I myself have for many many years blamed my mother for my problems, I'm now 37yrs old and have known I was different for as long as I can remember.

Presently where my son is concerned I feel like a very cold mother towards him, he is in his teens and suffers from anxiety, he has recently started new meds to help with this, last night he came home drunk (he threw up for most of the night)my mood towards him was that of concern, scared of what he is doing to himself, hurt as I don't want my son to feel the way he does about life etc. then this morning he acted as if he doesn't have a care in the world (i do know he does) when I tried to discuss what had happened he didn't understand why I was making a fuss, as the day went on I could barely talk to him, now he thinks I don't care.

I do fully understand what he is experiencing, as I struggled in my teens.


This post of mine probably doesn't make any sense at all, my thoughts make sense to me I just have problems expressing them properly.

I think the current concensus is the refigerator-mother idea was proposed at a time when everyone was obsessed with Freudian psycho-analysis. For that reason, it quickly gained more poularity than it deserved. Intellectual laziness, as someone pointed out earlier.

The last time I've checked, my Mother looked like a Mom, instead of a Fridge.

My thought, too.

Hi-Non fridge Mom here. When Chris was a baby I thought that there was something wrong with me. It seemed that there was not this instant love connection that everyone describes when they have a baby. Yes, I did love him but I did not feel like he knew me or needed me in particular. Steve and I used to call him the perfect beginner baby because he was so easy. I breastfed him and spent that time holding him but he was not all that cuddly and enjoyed hanging out under his play gym. He slept in a cradle and then his crib. He was never a big eye contact baby (now I know why). I was amazed when he finally seemed to recognize me and smiled. I made this huge attempt to cuddle him more and try to 'connect' when he was a toddler and then got critized for doing that by my dads new wife and my inlaws (guess they all though you could spoil a child with love).

Not to offend anyone, but the truth is that when Chris' sibs were born it was a totally different story. They looked right at me and it seemed like ZING! They knew me and I knew them. They needed me, they wanted to be held ALOT! And they slept in our bed for awhile because they pretty much needed to be near enough to smell and hear me.

Why am I sharing all this? I think that of course emotionally unavailable moms created emotionally hurt and challenged kids. I do not think that AS is caused by an emotionally distant mom or Chris would not have it. I think he was born that way and I was the one who had no idea and banged my head against the wall thinking that I was a bad mom or that I was doing something wrong. Chris is just who he is, as am I and as are his sibs. None of us are 'normal' by societal standards I am sure. And who would want to be anyway?! Boring!

Katherine

PS: Here is a ****HUG**** for those of you who did not get enough as kids because as a Mom I think that sucks and I feel for you!! !

My mom never hugged or kisses us as children. The one time i remember her doing was when she was going into the hospital for an operation. I found out later there was a chance she might have not made it. Now that we are grown-up she hugs and kisses us all the time

My mom isn't like yours. She actually pays attention to me and my sister but more attention is on my sister since she's a girl and she's only 10. Not like I have of that importance to tell me secrets that she tells my sister.

"Refrigerator Moms" were to blame because autism was seen to be a psychic injury, not a neurological disorder. There are two reasons for this; one is that parents often have some autistic traits, including "aloofness", lack of affection. People are very eager to make causal connections. There are various lifestyles and dispositions that were blamed on the parents, that are in fact genetic/natural occurences.
Secondly, there are emotional injuries set upon us by our parents. Being unwanted, different, or our parents are suffering from mental illness, unrealistic expectations, these conditions can set us up for childhood trauma that disables us. I wouldn't doubt many autistics and aspies also have childhood traumas that make communication harder because they can't trust people to help them.


I was blamed for the communication problem my family had when I was a child. They told me I was cold and stand offish and didn't want to be held. I remember people trying to force themselves on me and criticizing my emotional/social responses. All the time.

Ironically, When I had my son, I was blamed for his not speaking. I "spoiled" him, let him do what he wanted, didn't force him to talk, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerat ... .27_theory

Here is a link to the refrigerator mother theory. I has now been discredited for over 40 years. For coined by Kanner and Bruno Bettelheim but since discredited by the likes of Bernard Rimland who had an autistic son. Kanner later recanted but not Bettelheim.

This article will tell you what I think of Bettelheim.

A lot of that could describe my mother fairly accurately, actually.

She was hardly distant and cold - in a lot of ways she wasn't quite cold and distant enough (though I'm hesitant to say that, becuase I know she had the best intentions, and at least she never neglected me.) I tolerated her attempts to cuddle and connect with me, but I don't recall ever enjoying it, and I do recall times where I would have preferred being left alone.

I believe her mother was distant, though (and her father just left one day when she was a child, and was never heard from again); I think she's always felt emotionally neglected by her parents and by me, and her frustration with me was hard to miss, although it took me decades to understand why she was frustrated and hurt.

She has told me that I was a very quiet and well-behaved child (I was reminded of that a lot when I read what you said about "the perfect beginner baby" - quiet and well-behaved and seemingly perfect, but with each passing year it gets more and more clear that "something is missing", "something is wrong.")

I do think my father, in many ways, fits an Asperger's profile pretty closely. But still, I know he tried as hard as he could to connect in his own way. Either way, I couldn't count the number of times that either or both of my parents, after I'd done something horribly strange and abnormal, had to sit down with me and say, in utter frustration, "Do you do this on purpose? What do you want from me? I feel like I'm dealing with a brick wall... I just don't know how to get through to you." And me? I always just felt like the whole world runs on just fine without me, operating under rules I never quite understood, even when I improvised the best I could whenever I had to deal with the world.




So, no - I don't believe this is caused by the way my parents raised me - they both tried as hard as they could, and I can easily look back and see they put so much effort into it that there were times where they had very little left for anything else. It would be a horrible, untrue and unfair cheap-shot for me to try to say that I'm the result of "refrigerator parents."

On the other hand, research into my family tree has been somewhat revealing, and my ancestors and their relatives on both sides of the family have been a bit strange... they were pioneers ahead of the crowds across America, settling into some of the most isolated and desolate places on the continent. It wasn't unusual for them to disappear for years, or to leave their families and suddenly turn up someplace far away with a slightly different name. They would bring little with them and left hardly anything behind; the few documents they left behind were writen in horrible handwriting and often seemed to revolve around insanely narrow interests. So, I'm inclined to say that, at least in my case, this is almost certainly genetic, rather than "refrigeration" or vaccines.

I'm sure there is a small but significant subgroup of diagnosed aspies who have what would be called 'refridgerator' parents. Whether or not they actually caused their child's condition is another question entirely.

And I've frequently found myself wondering how likely it is that there could be several completely different conditions with somewhat similar "symptoms" that are loosely grouped together as "Higher Functioning Autism" and "Asperger's Syndrome." This is a large part of why I hesitate to put a name on whatever makes me different from "normal" people - what if it's not Asperger's, but something different which shares a few similarities? I don't think that cold, distant parents are a part of MY equation, but that doesn't mean that they aren't a part of the Asperger's equation... or, perhaps, "refrigerators" produce children who, in many ways, resemble aspies, but perhaps aren't...

...there's simply too much I don't know about all the different variables involved, a fact I can't help but hear nagging in the back of my mind as I try to wade through all the possibilities to get as close to the truth as I possibly can....

In any case, my instincts tell me that I need to be very careful about how much I trust what the "experts" have to say about it all... I can't exactly say why, but I have an overwhelming certainty that modern psychology and neurology are still not very far past drilling holes in peoples' heads to let evil spirits out.