The Refrigerator Mother Hypothesis
One of the more vile things done to the parents of autistic children is the insistence by some charlatans that they have caused the condition themselves. Some (total cads and bounders) say it is vaccines, or mercury in them, which cause the condition. A largely forgotten theory was the one that mothers created autism by not being emotionally open themselves, or by not showing enough love for their child. An offshoot of Quackwatch shows how mistaken this idea was here.
It isn’t just that we know that there’s a genetic component to autism now (if not genetics being the only component) as a result of the explanations by Simon Baron Cohen (just to recap this. There’s a spectrum of brain types, from empathizing to systemizing, known as the female and male brain types. Autism is an expression of the extreme male brain and the EQSQ personality tests you can see at the top of the page are based on this research and will help you place yourself on that spectrum.) and others.
Even the original progenitors of the refrigerator mother theory seem not to have considered two points. One is that many of the mothers studied had other children who were not autistic. Unless they think that such mothers were picking and choosing amongst their children in a particularly vile manner (something which they were not claiming) then their argument rather fails: because the behaviour of a mother that caused autism in one child should do so in another, correct?
The other point was that the observed emotional coldness probably worked the other way: as autistic children are unresponsive to the conventional displays of love and maternal care, they trigger fewer such displays. It is autism that created the perceived coolness, not the other way around.
January 1st, 2008 at 2:01 am
That makes sense, Tim. How can a person be warm and loving, day after day, to someone who can never return that warmth? It must be terrible. I suppose if anyone could do it, it would be a mother. But after a while, it would be very difficult to continue this way. Also, is it beneficial to force affection on those who don’t want it, and might even detest it?
An Amazon reviewer wrote an incredible response to a book on autism she, herself, detested: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0041570111?filterBy=addOneStar. In her review, she quoted autism expert Donna Williams who said for those with autism, enforced hugging only meets the hugger’s needs and only teaches force and compliance. Another reviewer of the same book, who suffers autism herself, said that hugging and other affection feels like “boiling water†being poured on her. She also said “skin-on-skin touch, with humans or any other creature, literally feels like it is scalding if I haven’t braced myself in advance,†and that as a child hugging felt “punitive.â€
I sympathize with any mother of a child who feels this way. My young boys love mom’s affection and I love giving it (of course this will change with adolescence…). How not be a ‘refrigerator mother’ when your child loathes affection and when it might even be harmful to them?
January 7th, 2008 at 12:06 am
That changing with adolescence is of course true….but believe me, it does in fact get better once they’ve been out of the house for a few years. I found this out in my own life. For complicated reasons that I won’t go into here I was still living at home when I was 21. Good Lord, my father and I despised each other. Then, for more complex reasons which again I won’t go into here, we parted and then met up again about 3 years later (no, we didn’t reject each other, simply lived in different countries) and since then we’ve been best of buddies. We are, after all, terribly similar, both genetically close and influenced by a lifetime with the same woman (his wife, my mother).
What was necessary (and explains the adolescence thing) was that we both acknowledged that I was an adult. The most important part that I did.
There’s a lovely Mark Twain quote which I’m about to mangle from memory. ” I left home when I was 20 because my father was so stupid. I met him again when I was 27 and it’s amazing what the old boy had learned in only 7 years”.