Autism

The complex neurological disorder autism, or autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) as it is most commonly known today, has been a cause for mother blame since the early 1940s. In the early days, professionals blamed mothers for lacking warmth and thereby contributing to children's lack of social reciprocity. Despite modern scientific knowledge, mothers of children with autism are still struggling to prove themselves guilt-free in the eyes of both professionals and society as a whole.

It was in 1943 that Dr. Leo Kanner, an Austrian-born child psychiatrist, first identified a unique group of children at his clinic at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. These children presented similar behaviors, such as failing to develop normal social relationships and being upset by changes in the environment; they also had marked language impairments.

Kanner pioneered the theory of the “refrigerator mother” in a paper in the 1940s, in which he attributed autism to a genuine lack of maternal warmth. Later, in a 1960 Time magazine interview, Kanner discussed the autistic child's withdrawal from other people as a result of highly organized and professional parents “just happening to defrost enough to produce a child.”

It was, however, another American, psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim, who gave the refrigerator theory widespread popularity. He compared autistic children to prisoners in Nazi concentrations camps, where human beings were deprived of healthy relationships, in particular with a mother figure. Bettelheim's articles in the 1950s and 1960s popularized the idea that autism was caused by maternal coldness toward their children. He consistently ignored the fact that a majority of these children had siblings who developed without these symptoms despite being mothered in the same way.

Modern knowledge and medical expertise have since abandoned the mother-blame theory. The cause of autism, however, still remains unclear and debated among experts. Most researchers, nevertheless, believe that it is triggered by a combination of genetic defects and environmental factors. Studies of the prevalence of autism differ from 20 per 10,000 individuals up to 60–70 per 10,000. While the exact figure is unknown, it is widely acknowledged that the incidence of autism has soared in recent years. This could be explained both by an increased polluted environment but also by a greater awareness and earlier diagnosis.