The Return of the "Refrigerator Mother" Theory

Sharing some links from around Substack and the Internet

“We’ve catalogued every way a father can fail—missing football games, traveling too much, never saying “I love you”—and clearly tied it to conduct disorders, risk-taking, and low empathy. Yet, we refuse to name the female equivalent needed to prevent psychiatric symptoms later in life. Doing so would mean admitting there is such a thing as optimal maternal care.”

—

Hannah Spier, MD

, “This is a Good Mother”, 2025

The “refrigerator mother” theory¹ of autism is slowly, but surely, making a comeback.

Frequent readers of this Substack will know that I have argued for over a year now that there is an element of truth to the “refrigerator mother” theory — that I believe that while “cold parenting” or “early childhood emotional neglect” is far from the only cause of autism and not a cause in every diagnosed case, it is nonetheless a significant cause in many cases of both diagnosed and self-diagnosed autism.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen multiple posts on Substack that essentially argue for or support this theory. I’m going to dive into them, but first, the usual caveats:

• Autism is not one “condition.” It is an umbrella term describing a cluster of symptoms (e.g. deficits in non-verbal communication, repetitive behaviours) which can arise from a multitude of causes which all interact with each other. These causes include nurture, genetic, environmental, pharmaceutical, and nutritional factors. If you took 100 cases of autism, you could easily have 100 different causal profiles. No cause applies to all cases, and no case will only have one cause. Each case should be seen as unique.

• “Refrigerator mother” is a bad name. The healthy nurturing of a child is the responsibility of both parents and also of extended family members and the broader community (i.e. “alloparents”). Singling mothers out is both unfair and incorrect. The “refrigerator mother” name arose from Kanner’s original paper on autism, but this was a misinterpretation / distortion. Kanner wrote that “there is a great deal of obsessiveness in the family background” of autistic patients and that among his cohort “there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers”.² You’ll note that he does not single out mothers — this came later, and the “refrigerator mother” misnomer was popularized by Bruno Bettelheim, not Kanner — and that he explicitly does not suggest that there was obsessiveness or a lack of warmth in the parents and other family members of all of his patients.

As I’ve previously written, the “refrigerator mother” theory was discarded not because of evidence against it, but due to a backlash from parents and the feminist movement, and by the introduction of the vaccines-cause-autism theory. To be clear, other causes of autism have been identified in clinical research — but the existence of other causes does not disprove that “cold parenting” is not also a cause. They merely prove that cold parenting is not the only cause.

Nonetheless, the “refrigerator mother” theory fell out of favour sometime around the 1970s.

But now, slowly, but surely, it’s making a comeback.

Several ABA (applied behavioural therapy) websites have recently added articles acknowledging early childhood emotional neglect as a potential cause of autism.

“The relationship between emotional neglect and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is complex. Emotional neglect is not the sole cause of autism, but it may contribute to the development of certain characteristics associated with ASD.

Children who have experienced emotional neglect may exhibit autistic traits at a higher rate compared to those who have not experienced neglect. A study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found a correlation between emotional neglect in early childhood and the presence of autistic traits in children.”³

Pretty much all of these articles will clarify that not all children who experience early childhood emotional neglect will become autistic, and not all children diagnosed with autism experienced early childhood emotional neglect. However, the correlation between the two has been found in several studies and case reports.

Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker, has also been making the rounds on the conservative podcast circuit lately discussing the importance of attentive nurture — in particular from mothers — in the first three years of a child’s life.

“As we struggle to explain the increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with conditions on the autism spectrum, ADHD, and other social and developmental disorders, we have to consider that this rise may be directly related to increased maternal stress and the lack of consistent, intimate engagement of mothers (and other caregivers) with children.”⁴

For this, she has received considerable backlash⁵, but nonetheless, her message is clearly resonating with a lot of people.

Mary Harrington

also circled around this point in an essay from a couple of years ago in the publication Unherd, “Fragile Students Just Need a Hug”. In it, she argues that “woke” activist-oriented students have many traits associated with early childhood emotional neglect. While she does not point this out, it is well-established that many “woke” young people — in particular those invested in gender ideology — are on the autism spectrum.

“[T}he “meltdowns”, the emotional dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.”⁶

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So Obvious, It’s Probably True: Complex PSTD as a Subtype of Autism

Holly MathNerd

published the below piece on Friday.

So Obvious, I'm Probably Wrong

She writes:

“This is just one of those things that drives me completely insane because it seems so obvious to me, but I look around and see….literally no one talking about it.

Autism is, at core, a disorder of social and emotional development — a neurological difference that impairs a person’s ability to perceive, process, and respond to social cues in a typical way. It affects things like eye contact, emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and theory of mind (the ability to intuit what others are thinking or feeling).

One way this can arise — not always, but plausibly and increasingly — is through a lack of consistent, fully-present attention from the adults around a child.”

Holly goes on to argue that the rise in smartphone use (and addiction) by parents and other caregivers may be one of the factors behind the recent spike in autism diagnoses — especially as the diagnostic criteria has widened to include people with milder autistic traits. I’ve made the same argument a handful of times (e.g. here and here).⁷

In addition to the rise in smartphone addiction by parents and other caregivers, several authors have pointed to the rise in early daycare use (in particular before the age of one) as one of the explanations for rising rates of autism, ADHD, and other psychiatric conditions.

Here’s an article from

Laura Wiley Haynes

about how early daycare use may be partially responsible for rising rates of autism:⁸

Universal Early Childhood Daycare Has Been Proven to Damage the Children Who Have Been Through It

Here’s Holly MathNerd again:

“One reason so many adults think they’re “on the spectrum” is unresolved trauma. A lot of traits that get coded as “spectrum-y” or “neurodivergent” aren’t about neurology at all. They’re adaptations to chronic emotional neglect or childhood chaos.”

Holly is only partially correct here. Chronic emotional neglect and childhood chaos affect brain development and wiring and brain-gut health, so it’s still about neurology.

Josh Slocum

makes a similar mistake in this recent piece:

Clearing out the bullshit

He writes, with his usual bite:

“In light of the recent hysteria over R. Kennedy's remarks on autism--normal, factual, plainly true remarks devoid of malice but full of good will--many people are asking:

“Do these hysterical, angry people protesting Kennedy actually want to avoid finding the cause of autism? Is it that they actually want there to be autism, and they're genuinely angry that someone is working to cure it?”

Yes. The answer is yes. Not an equivocal yes, not a subtle yes. A plain yes.

Yes, these people want “autism” to be real and uncured. But more, they want the perception of autism the way it helps their image as mothers to continue without question. Put another way, these women don’t have “autistic” children. They have children they’re abusing, and who are reacting to this abuse in the ways that normal creatures react to mistreatment. They’re acting out, they can’t control their emotions, and they’re developing lasting psychiatric trauma.”

This is echoed in a poignant quote from

Adam B. Coleman

’s new book, The Children We Left Behind⁹:

“Selfish parents not only exist in our friends and family circles, but are also prominent figures who hypnotize the public with excuses for their neglect.”

Now, I think Slocum is correct that in a minority of cases, children who are labelled as “autistic” have one or more abusive parents, and the abuse is one of the causes of their “autistic” traits. I also agree that many of these parents cling to the genetic explanation of autism (“neurodiversity” activism) and oppose research into other causes of autism because, as he says, it helps their image. However, I think early childhood emotional neglect — what Holly was talking about — is far, far more common than abuse.¹⁰

Furthermore, many parents — who love their children — may not realize that they are neglecting them, because in part thanks to the history of “poisonous pedagogies” in the Western world, there is a widespread cultural misunderstanding about the amount and kind of nurture and babies and toddlers need to thrive.¹¹

The loss of the “village” — separation from or lack of support from extended family in childrearing, lack of support for mothers, financial pressures, and other factors also make it far more difficult for parents to provide as much attention and care to their children as they may wish to. Both

Iain McGilchrist

¹² and Christopher Badcock¹³, in their respective books, have argued that much of the Western world is sub-clinically autistic (as Badcock puts it, we are in the “Age of Asperger”) — I would add to their arguments that the history of poisonous pedagogies in the Western world discussed by Alice Miller¹⁴ and the breakdown of the “village” are both large contributing factors to this.

Loneliness and poor attachment in childhood also increases the risk of loneliness and attachment disorders in adulthood — neglected children may struggle more to form meaningful friendships and romantic relationships, and, of course, this is also known to be the case with “autistic” children too.

I also think that Slocum is incorrect to say that these women do not have “autistic” children. “Autism” is clinically diagnosed based on observed and reported behaviours, and self-diagnosed based on how much a person relates to the descriptions of “autism” they find in diagnostic criteria and questionnaires, in articles, and on social media. In other words, if these children have behaviours that look like “autism” and identify with the descriptions they’ve read online of “autism”, then, technically speaking, they are “autistic”.

The criteria for “autism spectrum disorder” does not specify or exclude causes. As well, there is considerable evidence¹⁵ that early childhood emotional neglect was a contributing factor to the “autism” of many of the children in both Kanner and Asperger’s studies.

The “refrigerator mother” theory of autism was the dominant theory for decades in the 20th century for a reason.

Let’s look at common symptoms of early childhood emotional neglect and “Complex PTSD”, a folk diagnosis used to describe the complex trauma of people who experienced chronic abuse or emotional neglect in early childhood¹⁶:

• Sensory sensitivities / sensory processing issues

• Increased amygdala activation (enlarged amygdala in early life, shrunken amygdala in adulthood)

• Difficulties with emotional regulation

• Substance abuse (including refined sugar and processed food addictions)

• Self-harming and suicidality

• Dissociation

• Lack of interest in peers / impaired ability to form authentic relationships

• Repetitive play and “stimming” behaviours such as rocking and head-banging

• Outbursts / meltdowns

• Difficulty sleeping / insomnia / nightmares

• Anxiety / depression

• Theory of mind / cognitive empathy impairment

• Prosopagnosia / difficulty interpreting facial expressions

• Obsessive-compulsive tendencies / obsessiveness / perfectionism

• Rejection sensitivity

• Black and white thinking

• Disordered eating

• Chronic gastro-intestinal issues / IBS

• Chronic migraines

• Early puberty in girls / endometriosis and/or PCOS in girls

• Developmental delays, including social and language deficits

• A deep feeling of being “alone” / chronic feelings of emptiness

• Maladaptive daydreaming

• “Masking” or the creation of a “false self” / lack of sense of self

• Non-heterosexual sexual orientation¹⁷

All of these symptoms also characterize or are highly correlated with autism spectrum disorder.

It is well established in clinical literature that parents with Cluster B personality disorders — narcissism, borderline, histrionic, and/or antisocial — typically are not very nurturing parents and are more likely to abuse or emotionally neglect their children (I’ll add to this that they are also more likely to “hothouse” them, which I’ll discuss further later in this essay).

Research has found high rates of personality disorders and other psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, among parents of “autistic” children.

Arguably, “Complex PSTD” is a subtype of what is called “autism” — one defined by its cause (early childhood emotional neglect) as well as its symptoms. This makes it a more useful diagnosis, but unfortunately, the DSM does not currently recognize it, despite significant advocacy from clinicians.

“Autism spectrum disorder” is a diagnostic bucket for chronic brain inflammation and atypical behaviours caused by everything from early childhood emotional neglect, epigenetic complications, severe nutrient deficiencies, toxin exposures, and adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals (and more). The diagnosis essentially serves to obscure the actual causes of these differences, to protect both pharmaceutical companies and food companies, the broader culture, and caregivers from criticism.

All of these causes bleed into each other — parents who neglect their children would also be more likely to feed them a diet high in processed “convenience” foods, leading to nutrient deficiencies, gut disruption, disordered eating, and vulnerability to refined sugar addiction (and other addictions later in life). Chronic stress and nutrient deficiencies impair healing and detoxification, which increase vulnerability to adverse reactions to environmental toxins and pharmaceutical poisoning, including vaccine injury.

Frankly, I think we should abandon the diagnosis altogether and replace it with a series of diagnoses (such as Complex PTSD) that address the suspected underlying causes as well as the observable characteristics. I feel the same way about the personality disorders, in particular “narcissistic personality disorder” and “borderline personality disorder” — which also share considerable symptom overlap with “autism spectrum disorder” and Complex PTSD. The terms autistic and narcissistic are useful in a non-clinical sense to describe states of being, but the subtle difference between saying someone is “autistic” or is “narcissistic” versus that they have “autism spectrum disorder” or have “narcissistic personality disorder” opens the doors for an understanding of these states that are more conducive to healing.

Brains are plastic. Gut microbiomes can change, often very quickly, with dietary and lifestyle changes. Toxins can be detoxed or avoided. Inflammation can decrease, and so can inflammatory behaviours. Healing is possible, but only if the person believes they can heal and wants to heal, and only if the underlying causes / trauma is identified and addressed.

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The Dangers of Hothousing Kids

Two common types of child maltreatment that can disrupt healthy development but do not fall easily into either the “abuse” or “neglect” categories are helicopter parenting — overprotection and excessive involvement in a child’s life — and hothouse parenting.

“Hothouse” parenting is an extreme form of helicopter parenting, where the parents push a child to excel at a specific skill (e.g. chess, a musical instrument) and/or academics through intense study and practice, typically starting in the early toddler months or even during babyhood or infancy.¹⁸ It is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States and also very common in some Asian countries (e.g. South Korea, which has one of the highest rates of autism in the world).

Abigail Shrier

, in Bad Therapy (2024), also describes “hothouse” parenting and indicates that it is very common among the affluent communities she focusses her work on. She describes mothers choosing their children’s activities and even their friends, while at the same time “manipulating” them by offering patronizing, “fake” choices. Parents make each day “activity-jammed, presided over by a series of adults who judge [children’s] progress”, which contributes to children being so tired, “it feels as though [they] are missing a layer of skin.”¹⁹

A common example of hothouse parenting that can increase the risk of autistic development is teaching a child to learn to read before the age of two — this disrupts normal brain development of the right hemisphere by pushing a left-hemisphere dominant task on the child prematurely, and may explain some of the abnormal lateralization seen in some high-functioning autistic cases.²⁰

It is likely that many of the “autistic” children in Kanner and Asperger’s cohorts were hothoused children. From Kanner:

“The very detailed diaries and reports and the frequent remembrance, after several years, that the children had learned to recite twenty-five questions and answers of the Presbyterian Catechism, to sing thirty-seven nursery songs, or to discriminate between eighteen symphonies, furnish a telling illustration of parental obsessiveness.”

Recently,

Maia Poet

, an autistic detransitioner, wrote an essay describing her childhood with “hothouse” parents who “worked tirelessly to create the most enriching environment possible.”

Trans: When Adolescent Survival Strategy Becomes Family Breakdown

Maia Poet has also written:

“One common theme I have noticed from upper middle class parents of Gen Z kids, who are the group most vulnerable to adopting trans identities in adolescence or young adulthood, is that our parents are usually helicopter parents.”

Now, Maia is not quite correct here, though I have no doubt that her observations reflect her experience — while affluent children with helicopter parents are one of the groups most vulnerable to rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the group that appears to be the most vulnerable is actually foster children (with autistic traits) — which is what you would expect if early childhood emotional neglect were a significant risk factor for both autism and gender dysphoria.²¹

One gender specialist in Vancouver even boasted that half the children in his clinic were from the foster-care system.

To be clear, in most cases, both helicopter parenting and hothouse parenting are manifestations of a very anxious and misguided kind of love for the child in an increasingly hyper-competitive and difficult world.

However, in at least some cases, “hothouse” parenting seems to stem from the parents’ narcissistic ambitions for their child (and themselves), and the child’s achievements are used as a source of “narcissistic supply” for the parents.

“It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.”²²

There’s nothing wrong with providing an intellectually enriching environment for your children, as long as the tasks are age-appropriate, and as long as any focus on academics and other left-brained cognitive achievements are well-balanced with right-hemisphere development: with play, with socializing, with singing and dancing and goofing around, with exercise and sport, with nature, with an appreciation for cooking and healthy whole food, with connection, with love.

And the academics should wait until after the child is three. The first three years should belong to the right hemisphere.

Here’s Erica Komisar:

In addition to autistic development, “hothouse” parenting also appears to increase the risk that the child will later develop gender dysphoria — as was the case with Maia Poet.

Both Lisa Littman and

Lisa Marchiano

²³ have reported that an unusually high number of ROGD (rapid onset gender dysphoria) cases are “gifted” children. I have also observed that many of the distressed parents on the

PITT

(Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans) Substack mention that their ROGD child is “gifted”, with some even going as far as to mention the child’s specific score on an IQ test.

I discussed the dangers of hothouse parenting and how it may increase the risk of a child later being diagnosed with “autism” and/or ADHD and/or developing gender dysphoria in great detail in “The Drama of the Gifted Children”.

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The Challenge for Feminism

Currently, there are two major camps of belief around what is called “autism” — the “neurodivergence” activists (autism has always existed and is genetic, and rising rates are due to better identification and widening diagnostic criteria) and the “anti-vaccine” activists (autism is caused by vaccines and did not exist before them).

These two sides tend to be at each other’s throats, with the neurodivergence activists claiming that vaccines do not cause autism and pointing to studies that find no connection between the two, and anti-vaccine activists pointing out that “genes do not cause epidemics”.

While there is some good evidence for both genetic causes and cases of vaccine injury triggering autistic regression, I tend to think both sides are overstating the effect size.

The anti-vaccine activists are correct that more children are autistic than in previous generations, and that cases of autism have become more severe. This strongly points to various environmental and pharmaceutical causes — not just vaccines, but many, many other factors as well.

The neurodiversity activists are correct that there is evidence of cases of high functioning autism throughout history, before the invention of and widespread use of vaccines — of course, if early childhood neglect is a significant risk factor for autistic development, this makes perfect sense, as there have always been abused, neglected, hothoused, and orphaned children.²⁴

I’ve outlined some of the evidence that early childhood emotional neglect is a significant factor in at least some diagnosed (and self-diagnosed) cases of autism. The other significant factor that has quite a lot of evidence backing it is nutritional deficiencies and diets high in processed foods and refined flour and sugars.

“Autism” is largely characterized by social deficits (in particular in non-verbal communication) and chronic gastrointestinal issues, nutritional deficiencies, and picky eating (e.g. ARFID, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder). Early childhood neglect and dietary factors should be at the forefront of the conversation around it.

What the genetics and vaccines arguments have in common is that they let caregivers and the broader culture off the hook for the rising rates of autism and other psychiatric conditions in young people.

I do not think this is a coincidence.

If “autism” is mostly genetic or mostly caused by vaccines, then we do not have to ask the question — do babies and toddlers need one (or more) attentive caregivers at home taking care of them and cooking healthy food for them in order to thrive?

Did the influx of women — specifically mothers of young children — into the world of work cause more harm than good?

As Erica Komisar has said:

“In an effort to guard women’s rights, children’s rights were thrown under the bus.”²⁵

I am aware of the feminist arguments here. I am also aware of the counter-arguments, the “anti-feminist” arguments. I’m not going to go into them — this essay is long enough as it is — but I think both have valid points. I’d love to see some discussion about this in the comments.

I will make the following points, however:

• According to David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018), approximately half the jobs in the West are “bullshit”, as in they do not need to exist — they contribute nothing positive to society (or actively harm it), they are busy work, or they exist because the necessity for them is created by the culture of overwork (e.g. with both parents working, the need for more daycare workers increases).

• Most women do not have high-powered, interesting careers. Most women — most people — have jobs that kind of suck.

• If parents left the workforce en masse to stay at home with their children, this would shift more power to workers (fewer workers) which would hopefully result in higher wages.

• The maternity leave conversation is complicated by the fact that extended maternity leaves disproportionately put pressure on small and independent businesses — I personally think the world is better with more small businesses and fewer government jobs and jobs at large corporations (the latter which disproportionately make up Graeber’s “Bullshit” jobs).

• Both surveys and my personal experience indicates that the majority (not all) of mothers with young children wish they could not work, work part-time, or work from home in order to spend more time with their children. The typical barriers to this are financial need (many mothers are now the primary breadwinner, many families cannot survive on a single salary) and the investment of years and thousands of dollars into elite educations in order to reach high-powered careers — which makes them difficult to give up.

• Women have higher rates of burnout in the work force than men do.

• Many women are interested in creative careers. Being a stay-at-home mother who is financially supported by your partner (or family) is very conducive to writing novels (or a Substack!) or painting or building a business as a social media influencer (etc). I work on my essays by getting up in the morning before my kids do, and taking advantage of naps and my older daughter’s preschool. This, of course, applies to all jobs that can be done from home with flexible hours.

• Not all women want to have children, and that’s fine. And for the highly careerist women who do want children, stay-at-home fathers and grandparents make good primary caregivers as well. (And nannies are preferable to daycare).

I’m going to wrap this up by sharing a beautiful essay by

Kyra

:

The Unique Challenge of Becoming a Mother for Intellectual Women

Like the author, I am very “left-brain dominated” and cerebral. I actually fit many of the stereotypes of the “refrigerator mother” well — I was very standoffish and cold when I was younger (I’ve worked on this), I like my books, and I can be quite obsessive (just read literally any essay on this Substack).

Anecdotal evidence indicates that “geniuses” and people with extremely high “IQs” (of both sexes!!) are more likely to make poor parents (yes, yes, there are exceptions). Regardless of your sex, I think if you are the type of person who wishes to pursue their brilliance at an extremely high level, it is probably best not to have children. Go be a genius! We need geniuses — including female ones.

Because becoming a parent — a good parent — means you have to sacrifice some of your ambition. You have to learn how to become more cognitively balanced, more right-hemisphere oriented, less autistic, in order to nurture your children. And this can be difficult — but it’s far from impossible.

My older daughter is in half-day preschool instead of daycare, so I know a lot of stay-at-home and part-time / flex-work mothers. Something I’ll note: these women tend to be very smart (and beautiful, and kind, and frequently very cool). There’s a myth out there that STAH mothers are not as interesting or intelligent as working moms — or that they are “wasting” the talents they have on motherhood. I think this is completely nonsense.

As a STAH mother, I’ve found that learning how to become a better cook — including developing and honing my own healthy recipes — and learning about nutrition and folk medicines to be very intellectually stimulating. (Cleaning and laundry suck, but someone has to do it — also some people like cleaning? I’ll admit that sometimes I need a microdose of psilocybin and a story I tell myself about banishing the dark spirits in my house with lemon essential oil to become more productive in this area).

While I found it heartbreaking to give up playing ice hockey for my kids (I still play dodgeball once a week, but I was on four sports teams prior to motherhood and am now down to one), there’s a lot of joy in exercising with your kids — taking babies out for long walks strapped to your chest in a wrap, dancing with them, or baby yoga (my kids both love baby yoga, but it does come with the real risk that they will vomit on your face).

If you love reading, audiobooks are a great option — I’ll admit I listen to them during those long breastfeeding sessions. Modern technology, has, in many ways, made stay-at-home motherhood significantly more enjoyable than it would have been in the 1950s or 60s — even for those of us who are overly cerebral and nerdy.

Copernican

, in his own way, makes this point in the following essay:

How Feminism Will Finally End

He argues — correctly, I think — that one of the drivers of women into the workforce was “suburban boredom”, and that technologies such as social media have made staying at home with children significantly less boring. This, he argues, will contribute to the end of feminism.

Maybe.

But I think — I hope, at least — that the bigger factor will be the widespread recognition that our children need us. Fathers are great, grandparents are great, but babies and toddlers want Mommy.

And I hope that our love for them is greater than our ambitions.

As always, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts (and criticisms) in the comments section. If a debate gets going, I ask that everyone be respectful.

1. Also known as “Cold Mother Syndrome”.

2. Leo Kanner, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact”, Nervous Child, 1943, pages 217-250 (page 34 of PDF).

3. https://www.yellowbusaba.com/post/does-emotional-neglect-cause-autism

4. Erica Komisar, Being There (2017), page 41

5. An illustrative and typical example of the backlash to Komisar can be found in

Elena Bridgers

’s four-part series on Komisar. Bridgers’ misrepresents Komisar’s arguments, “debunking” strawman versions of it (seen in Parts 1 and 2), she focusses her criticism on how Komisar’s arguments are “insulting” and “harmful” instead of actually engaging with the scientific evidence (there is zero mention of the brain hemispheres and development, a core component of Komisar’s argument), and she swears a fair bit and flings around a lot of insults. She also misrepresents the history of the “refrigerator mother” theory (I’m guessing due to a lack of familiarity with the literature) and falsely claims there was “zero evidence” to support the theory, when there is, in fact, quite a lot of evidence that cold parenting is one of the causes of autism and other psychiatric disorders — just not the only one. I do agree with Bridgers that not just mothers matter, and that other family members and the broader community play an important role in nurturing a child — I also agree that it’s counterproductive to “blame” mothers when low-nurture is a familial and cultural problem stemming in part from a lack of support for mothers — however, if Bridgers had bothered to read Komisar’s books instead of just listening to one podcast, she would have learned that Komisar does quite a good job of addressing this, as do other proponents of the “nurture” argument such as Gabor Mate, Darcia F. Narvaez, and Greer Kirshenbaum.

6. Mary Harrington, “Fragile Students Just Need a Hug”, 2022, Unherd

7. The “Still Face” experiment demonstrates the harms of inattentive parenting.

8. Again, autism is not one condition and does not have one cause, and no one is arguing that all kids who start daycare in babyhood will become autistic or that no kids with a stay-at-home parents will become autistic.

9. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to read this one yet, but I read several compelling reviews of it and it seems very relevant to this discussion, even if Coleman is not autistic himself and does not discuss autism directly. Links to reviews here, here, and here, and an excerpt here.

10. I realize neglect can be characterized as a type of abuse, but I find it more useful to separate the two conceptually. Abuse describes things that happen to a child, assaults on their self-esteem or body of all kinds, verbal, psychological, physical, sexual (etc). Neglect describes things that do not happen — an absence of nurture.

11. See Darcia F. Narvaez’s Psychology Today column, “Moral Landscapes”.

12. The Master and His Emissary (2009), The Matter with Things (2021)

13. The Imprinted Brain (2009), The Diametric Mind (2019)

14. For Your Own Good (1980)

15. Both Kanner’s and Asperger’s papers support this — although neither indicates that early childhood neglect was the only cause, and both suggest the possibility that the coldness, obsessiveness, and cerebral tendencies seen in the parents and other family members of their patients may have been merely correlational. Alice Miller’s work on “poisonous pedagogies” and the toxic history of parenting books in the West also provides considerable support for the idea that early childhood emotional neglect is causal in autistic development. There are also several animal studies (e.g. Harry Harlow’s monkey experiment) and studies on children raised in orphanages and other institutions which demonstrate that early neglect leads to an increased likelihood of “autistic” behaviours such as rocking / “stimming” or social deficits. As well, James W. Prescott’s research on tribal cultures and early childhood nurture (“Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence”) describes “autistic” behaviours among people raised in cultures where infants are raised with low physical affection from mothers and other caregivers.

16. I assembled this list from various books about Complex PTSD, early childhood emotional neglect, narcissistic parenting, and the effects of “poisonous pedagogies”. Some of the authors include: Alice Miller, Elan Golomb, Ramani Durvasula, Gabor Mate, Karyl McBride, Craig Buck and Susan Forward, Bessel van der Kolk, and Pete Walker. For the purposes of this essay, I verified every item I included with a Google search, which you are welcome to do as well.

17. Here’s a link to an interesting example of a study linking early childhood adverse experiences with an increased rate of homosexuality in men — but only if they had certain COMT and MTHFR gene variants. This demonstrates how genes and environmental factors — including neglect and abuse — frequently interact to produce certain outcomes.

18. For more on hothouse parenting and the adverse effects on children, see Alissa Quart’s Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (2006).

19. All quotes from Bad Therapy (2024) by Abigail Shrier.

20. While the main language centres are found in the left hemisphere of most people, in high functioning autism more activity is seen in the right hemisphere. See Christopher Badcock, The Imprinted Brain (2009), pages 31 and 47.

21. Another detransitioner,

Laura Becker

, also recently published an essay discussing how emotional neglect can lead children to fall into the gender ideology. She writes:

“One time I tried crying to my mom, desperate for support. I was probably 18-19. She said “I’m not your therapist.” I felt like if even my own mom doesn’t believe in me, I’m forsaken.” No therapist replaces a mother’s love.

She outsourced her parenting to a nebulous “expert” because she was emotionally withdrawn. I didn’t even have a therapist at the time, all I had was her. This is what emotionally unavailable parents say and do. They expect some stranger with a license to take care of their kids.

You may think she was giving me “freedom” as “an adult.” But this was our dynamic since I was a young child. She told me I had a chemical imbalance, autism, and needed medication while ignoring her abusive husband’s chronic cruelty. I believed I was inherently broken.”

22. Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (2006), page 30

23. https://4thwavenow.com/2017/06/25/gender-dysphoria-and-gifted-children/

24. Let’s look at some of the examples of famous people who have been retroactively suspected of being on the autism spectrum (some of these examples are pulled from books, in particular Badcock’s, but I verified all through Google and you can as well):

Adolf Hitler — abusive father
Martin Luther — abusive parents
Henry Cavendish — mother died before he was two
Nikola Tesla — “difficult” relationship with his parents
Hans Christian Andersen — father died when he was 11, left “alone” for much of his childhood because his mother had to work so much
Emily Dickinson — “aloof” mother, childhood marked by “emotional neglect”
Isaac Newton — born prematurely to a widowed mother and left in the care of his grandmother, childhood “marked by early loss and a sense of abandonment”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — probably an example of a hothoused child
Charles Darwin — mother died when he was eight, possibly had a “tyrannical” father
John Nash — hothoused by his mother
Alan Turing — parents absent during his early childhood, raised by friends / foster care
Jonathan Swift — father died before he was born, sent at age four to live with an uncle
Ludwig van Beethoven — hothoused by his father
Rene Descartes — childhood “marked by early loss and a focus on education”, mother died when he was a baby, largely raised by grandmother
Patricia Highsmith — childhood “marked by instability and a sense of being unwanted”, mother tried and failed to abort her, parents split shortly after her birth
John Stuart Mill — hothoused by his father

Just for fun, I’ll throw in a couple of contemporary examples:

Elon Musk — abusive father Musk has referred to as a “terrible human being”
Greta Thunberg — parents frequently accused of being “abusive” and exploiting her

Anyway, not all of the famous people who have been suspected of being high-functioning autistic have known childhood histories of abuse, neglect, or hothousing, but quite a lot of them do.

Feral children also tend to be high in autistic traits — in fact, the Wikipedia page for history of autism lists a feral child from the 1700s as one of the early cases of suspected autism.

25. Erica Komisar, “Motherhood, Feminism and Child Outcomes”, YouTube