Refrigerator mother

Refrigerator mother theory is a widely discarded theory that autism is caused by a lack of maternal warmth. Current research indicates that a combination of genetic factors and exposure to environmental agents predominate in the cause of autism.

The terms refrigerator mother and refrigerator parents were coined around 1950 as a label for mothers and parents of children diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia. When Leo Kanner first identified autism in 1943, he noted the lack of warmth among the parents of autistic children. Parents, particularly mothers, were often blamed for their children's atypical behavior, which included rigid rituals, speech difficulty, and self-isolation. Kanner later rejected the "refrigerator mother" theory, instead focusing on brain mechanisms.

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.... They were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost. 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." In Kanner's original paper, however, only one set of parents were described as "cold", with many family members appearing to be from one neurological minority or another upon close reading of the text.

Bruno Bettelheim at University of Chicago was instrumental in facilitating its widespread acceptance both by the public and the medical establishment, even though Bettelheim was a fraudulent child psychologist who had greatly misrepresented his credentials.

In the 1950s and 1960s. In the absence of any biomedical explanation of autism's cause after the telltale symptoms were first described by scientists, Bettelheim as well as actual psychoanalysts championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting, thus depriving their children of the chance to "bond properly."

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