Refrigerator mother

• Emotional refrigerator


  Cold, distant and overly intellectual
• Kanner


  • Studied 11 children with ASD noting their behaviour
  • Observed 'very few warm-hearted fathers and mothers'
  • Suggested many reasons for this, including the 'weird situation'
• Psychodynamic approach


  Freudian, focused on adverse childhood experiences, popular in the 1940s, looked for emotional causes of ASD symptoms in childhood relationships
• Bettelheim and the empty fortress


  • 1960s theory that ASD was an emotional disorder caused by psychological damage in childhood due to cold, detached mothers
  • Compared children with ASD to those in Nazi camps, suggesting the deprivation suffered was similar to lack of maternal experience
  • Proposed the 'refrigerator mother' who cares but lacks a relationship, leading to ASD as a defence mechanism
• Bettelheim's theory


  1. When children are faced with challenge, they withdraw

  2. When they receive comfort, they try again

  3. Children with ASD are faced with coldness and withdraw further

  4. The solution is to remove the children and raise them in a structured environment with warmth and emotional care
• There is no evidence to support Bettelheim's theory, and the majority of parents do not match the description, even when they do their children don't have ASD
• Cambell found that 93% of children with ASD don't have siblings with it, indicating parenting doesn't cause ASD
• Some symptoms of ASD are similar to brain damage, suggesting a more biological rather than psychogenic cause
• Mothers of children with ASD are often overwhelmed by stress and depression, but stress doesn't cause ASD, ASD may cause stress
• Bettelheim's theory blames mothers, leading to guilt and blame on women
• This theory is still popular despite lack of valid research, demonstrating the danger of accepting ideas without evidence or questioning