Did you have a "Refrigerator mother"? (Poll)

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There is a rather interesting Wikipedia article on the "refrigerator mother" or psychogenic theory of autism. Some excerpts:

"The refrigerator mother theory, widely discarded in the United States, still has some support in Europe and is largely believed in South Korea to be the cause of autism."

"According to Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry, the psychogenic theory of autism was abandoned for political pressure from parents' organizations, not for scientific reasons."

"In his 1943 paper that first identified autism, Leo Kanner called attention to what appeared to him as a lack of warmth among the fathers and mothers of autistic children."

"In a 1949 paper, Kanner suggested autism may be related to a "genuine lack of maternal warmth", noted that fathers rarely stepped down to indulge in children's play, and observed that children were exposed from "the beginning to parental coldness, obsessiveness, and a mechanical type of attention to material needs only.... Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude."

"In a 1960 interview, Kanner bluntly described parents of autistic children as "just happening to defrost enough to produce a child."

"...Bruno Bettelheim, a University of Chicago professor and child development specialist, and other leading psychoanalysts championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting..."

"Clinician Frances Tustin devoted her life to the psychogenic theory. She wrote:

One must note that autism is one of a number of children's neurological disorders of psychogenic nature, i.e., caused by abusive and traumatic treatment of infants.… There is persistent denial by American society of the causes of damage to millions of children who are thus traumatized and brain damaged as a consequence of cruel treatment by parents who are otherwise too busy to love and care for their babies."

"Alice Miller, one of the best-known authors of the consequences of child abuse, has maintained that autism is psychogenic, and that fear of the truth about child abuse is the leitmotif of nearly all forms of autistic therapy known to her. When Miller visited several autism therapy centers in the United States, it became apparent to her that the stories of children "inspired fear in both doctors and mothers alike":

I spent a day observing what happened to the group. I also studied close-ups of children on video. What became clearer and clearer as the day went on was that all these children had a serious history of suffering behind them. This, however, was never referred to.… In my conversations with the therapists and mothers, I inquired about the life stories of individual children. The facts confirmed my hunch. No one, however, was willing to take these facts seriously."

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When I first heard the description of "refrigerator mothers" I immediately thought it applied to my mother, and thought that the theory made sense.

But apparently there are also a lot of good reasons to reject the idea that such mothers cause their child's autism. For example:
1. Some clearly autistic children are born to parents who do not fit the autistic parent personality pattern.
2. Parents who do fit the description of the supposedly pathogenic parent almost invariably have normal, non-autistic children.
3. With very few exceptions, the siblings of autistic children are normal.
(etc.)

Still, it would be very interesting to know what percentage of us had mothers which could be described as cold, distant, rejecting, abusive, etc.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

I wish your poll had more choices.

You should also consider that genetic heretibility of risk of ASD is 90%. Perhaps what was once thought of as 'refrigerator mother' might actually be incidence of undiagnosed, female ASD--genetic transmission, not environmental.

Not my parents. I dont like this theory.

Such as?



Do we know this for a fact? If you have a reference, I'd like to see it. (Not disputing you - I just want to learn more)

From the same Wikipedia article: "The modern consensus is that autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are complex and are not well understood." Sounds pretty vague to me.

As we've seen, the "consensus" can change on a dime, and is often based merely on a theory with little evidence to back it up.



Good point - I thought of that. Isn't it also the case that people on the spectrum tend to find and marry each other? I think both of my parents could've been HFA or Asperger's...

Would you care to elaborate? I really would like to hear your thoughts.

No.My mother read me bedtime stories, and packed me nice lunches with cookies and a smiley face on the napkin.


The "cold mother" theory is just another case of blame the mother for everything wrong with the kid and reflects the extreme ignorance of society at the time and the lack of knowledge of neurological disorders.

Both of my parents are screw-ups. They could've done better as parents, but there was no guarantee I would've turned out right.

And this is a really bad poll, if your intention was to prove or disprove anything.

I don't know... I think mothers have tremendous influence on their kids. I can certainly see how a kid could be massively affected depending on whether its mother is warm and loving or cold and punishing. Surely you've seen examples of both types of mothers? Granted, this sort of thing is likely a continuum, so most mothers would be somewhere in the middle.

And the theory was also the product of observations by many leading experts in the field, including those mentioned in the article.

It seems to do the whole "blame the parents" thing. Some parents of people on the spectrum probably do have traits of being unemotional, or very logical or scientific, however this does not mean the parent will be a neglectful rejecting parent.

I just think more options might be more useful. My mother had moments of both. I can't really answer yes or no to that. But then, I also think she was very likely an undiagnosed Aspie and most of her "cold", rigid or unempathetic moments are something I finally understand in this context. That's different than being "cold" in my opinion. Hard to answer definitively.



Yep, just saw it presented today by Pat Levitt, PhD (Director, ZilkhaNeurogeneticinistitute & Chair, Dept Cell and Neurobiology, Keck School of Medicine of USC) in a talk titled: Addressing Heterogeneity of the Autisms - The Brain-Gut Connection. Please note, that's heretability of the RISK of autism at 90%, not the actual incidence of autism.



Yes, we tend to understand each other better than NTs (in my opinion) and many women are under the radar. I have a hard time believing that men and women are so different in incidence of a primarily genetic disorder, especially since the genes identified so far don't appear to be sex dependent (like color blindness). In recent years we've gone from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4, but I think a lot of women/girls are never discovered.

My mother is very loving, and often (less now, for various reasons) shows affection in a very NT manner. That is to say. in a manner that hurts me. Now that we can communicate, she and I have found a happy medium where both of us are capable of performing the actions and neither is pained by the other, though it requires both of us to consciously remember sometimes what we're using to communicate affection.

However, growing up, because I am an Aspie, I did not perceive that my mother loved me, so for a long while there...

Your poll doesn't have enough options, though. What about orphans? What about people whose mothers were sort of meh? What about people who couldn't perceive their mothers?

I wasn't raised by my mom.

You don't really seek actual answers, you seek agreement even though that theory has been debunked. It just gives more excuses for other ignorant mean spirited parents to hurl insults at mothers trying the best they can to help someone the vast majority don't understand.

This theory is stupid and outdated!

My Mom is warm and friendly to me. Well, she is practical and demanding, but she only wants me to live independently, on my own, because she loves me.
She's NT, but she has some Aspie traits - she doesn't like parties and people make her tired.

Why mothers and not fathers?

nature versus nurture? which one is the cart versus horse? are "refrigerator" parents themselves possessing of autistic traits?
i don't blame my parents whom i continue to believe did the best they could with what they had, in terms of their own lack of parental nurturing as they grew up themselves in addition to their unfavorable familial genetic complement handed down through the generations. my father related to me that when he was a child he had several "crazy" relatives as well, and in further discussion it dawned on me that their behavior [which my father described as best he could] was reminiscent of people with autistic traits. but "coldness" is a common thread running through my family tree.

A lot of people are saying that I should've put more options. Of course I thought of that, giving at least a third option like "somewhere in the middle", etc., but I wanted to get a sense of how true this theory might be, if not in a causative sense, then at least in a co-existent sense, so I thought just two options would be best.

I put "generally" in both options, because I recognize that everyone is a mixture, or that nobody is entirely at one extreme. I mean, my mother wasn't ALWAYS cold, distant, abusive, etc. - just most of the time. More so than not. And as I got to know other people in my life, and seen other mothers, both in real life and in the movies, on TV, etc., I came to realize "yeah, my mom's not as warm, loving, nurturing, "motherly" as these other moms...

It's not that I don't love my mother - I do, and I understand now how hard it must've been for her, probably autistic, probably suffereing from depression, definitely introverted and suffering a bad marriage (and perhaps a difficult kid? But if so, I don't know how I was difficult). But as I was growing up and feeling neglected and/or abused a lot of the time, I really hated her much of that time. She's already passed away, far too early, so I can't ask her so many things I'd like to ask. But she "punished" me quite a lot, and it hurt like HELL, emotionally more than physically, and I cried something horrible, far too many times, and I really don't know WHAT on earth I did. So it didn't feel like punishment to me - it felt like abuse. I thought she was a monster a lot of the time.

To this day, I feel extremely upset if I hear a kid crying the way I cried - or if I see a woman hitting her kid in a store, etc. It seems you don't see that as much anymore - I guess society does progress in some ways. I don't know. But I feel furious when I see a woman being mean to her kid, where the kid is obviously being emotionally tortured. I don't know how anyone can do that to a kid. It's monstrous. Just horrible. And that HAS to have a terrible effect on the kid.

Which is not to say that this is the explanation for autism. But it does seem a bit weird that all the early experts seemed to notice this strong pattern of autistic kids having cold, distant, mothers (parents, actually - the theory does mention fathers too), and then all of a sudden, what? The pattern is found to not exist? Or the opposite is true now, that autistic kids tend to have especially warm, loving mothers/parents?

What about the point that this theory is still considered valid or at least not completely discredited in other countries (France was mentioned in another article)? What about the point that maybe this theory was "debunked" based on parent's objections rather than scientific evidence?

It's certainly possible that it's both - both genetic and also environmental, because the mother herself is autistic, and thus not able to form a proper bond with her infant, which itself is also autistic, and so unlikely to be receptive to bonding...

I don't know. I just wanted to get some discussion going. I'm trying to learn.