Aspies For Freedom

The only two problems I have, personally, with the refrigerator mother theory are these:
1) There do exist autistic children who were not abused by their parents.
2) Many parents of autistics begin mistreating their children after they note that there is "something wrong" with their children.  The attitude of parents towards their children changes drastically after the diagnosis, as well.  Parents may love their children, but be too focused on "curing" or "saving" them to see how much damage they are doing.  So then, I ask, how do we differentiate abuse AFTER autism from abuse BEFORE autism?  Especially when we know signs of autism often begin to develop very soon after birth.

My parents have always been loving and supportive of me; we are not extremely close, but we get along well. In fact, I think I come from an exceptionally functional family. As previously mentioned, we aren't at all lovey-dovey or "Let's spend lots and lots of sticky-sweet quality time together and bond and tell each other all of our most secret secrets and hopes and fears!"*, but my parents aren't cold or cruel or even negligent. They don't give preferential treatment to my NT siblings, they try to respect that my needs and desires are often very different from theirs, they put up with my occasional meltdown. They're rather bewildered by me, as I am by them, sometimes, and deep down they may even wish I could be more like my brother or more like my sister, but this doesn't manifest in their behavior towards us. We fight pretty rarely, and I'm usually the one who incites arguments, not them.

In conclusion, based on personal experience, I think the "refridgerator mother" theory is very flawed, to say the least. Furthermore, if abusive and negligent parents were responsible for autism, one would expect the symptoms of autism to eventually recede once an autistic child was removed from a toxic home environment. An easy cure. But this is not the case; believe me, if it were, we'd be seeing something about it in the mainstream press--most people, face it, including the US government, would love to find an easy cure for autism--, "political correctness" be damned.

Feral children appear to be autistic, because they have been isolated during their most formative years and certain centers of their brains have failed to develop and essentially shut down. However, the general consensus among scientists is that, generally, these children are not actually autistic; they just happen to exhibit many of the behaviors that are associated with LFA (or HFA, I guess, in the case of Kaspar Hauser). Also, this hardly indicates that "isolation from other humans causes autism". Most autistics are not feral children.

Um, okay, I'm done. My typing thumb is sore.

These are the same bullshit sorts of theories that get bounced around on homosexuality.

The International Foundation for the Advancement and Preservation of Normalcy (I'm sure there's such an organization...) just isn't happy unless they have someone to blame for every naturally occurring difference among people.

The Blame Mom Caucus dominated popular theory for a hundred years. They can STFU now -- neuroscience is past its long infancy and we're headed toward truth at last.

The mentioning of the "refrigerator mother" prompted me to find the place were I read about it just recently. It is mentioned in the book "Mental illness in childhood: a study of residential treatment" by V.L. Kahan (Tavistock Publ. Ltd, 1971). It says that it was Kanner who put forth the idea of the refrigerator mother as the cause to the illness in the 11 children that he based his 1943 article on. It was a controversal concept even during the 40ies.

Dr. Kahan gives a detailed account of the management and treatment of the children under his care at West Stowell House between 1959 and 1965. Not all of the children were autistic. The book contains 16 selected case histories but the study is based on a total of 71 children.

It was surprising to learn that the cold mother theory is still alive. I thought it was dead, cremated, buried and utterly forgotten. T'was sad to see that Alice Miller hangs on to the idea of a psychogenic origin.

Point. That was a poorly constructed sentence all around ("general consensus is that generally..").

Bullshit. I was never abused by my parents.

Yes, I believed it was thoroughly discredited years ago. I also think it is a load of rubbish in nearly every case.

I still wonder if severe overstimulations in young age could cause low-functionism, possibly caused by abuse but also other factors.

There will always be someone who "thinks" (I use the term loosely! ) that they have some wonderful new simple insight into the strange and messy human condition that will turn everyone into happy clappy clones. Often the 'insight' is overtly religious, but these days can masquerade as science.

I'm sorry, people. Humans are ALL DIFFERENT.

The apparently common need for people to classify everything - including eachother - into distinct groupings doesn't mean that any of us actually FIT any such group completely.

So, some abused kids are autistic. Surprise, surprise. Since we are found worldwide in every conceivable sub-classification of people it would be surprising if there were NO abused autists.

In my experience (admittedly limited) if you can substitute a racial classification into an article about autism and it makes the same (lack of) sense, THEN THE ARTICLE IS RUBBISH and is merely the author's prejudice.

Supposing she had studied ghetto kids........

Hooray for circular logic!!

I thought that nowadays the generally accepted opinion is that the "refrigerator mother" theory is outdated, unfounded -- not to mention insulting to families.

Also a lot of it is based on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, much of which makes parents to blame for everything.

Freud has been dead for many years too.

Strangely enough, the kids who come across as most spoiled are often the ones who have been left to cry it out for a long time and then given what they want. They learn that the only way to get their parents to do what they want is to throw huge tantrums and keep going and eventually the parents will give in.