Is it my fault?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Scientists used to believe it was. They thought autism was caused by bad parenting.

[00:00:04]Kanner observed that autistic moms were cold, analytical, detached from their children. He called them refrigerator moms. Uh they believed that if you hugged autistic kids enough, you could hug the autism out of them by giving them the affection they lacked at home.

[00:00:17]Kids were routinely institutionalized to take them away from their horrible parents. Uh this rarely worked that well for the kids. All this was wrong. Autism is mainly genetic. It's as heritable as height.

[00:00:28]Any developmental divergences has happened so early in life, prenatally, or in the first few months of life when the baby is in the potato phase. Uh so why the detachment that psychologists observed? Well, it's coming from the other end.

[00:00:42]Autistic children don't give the same social rewards back to uh a parent trying to interact with them that a neurotypical child would. They're not giving the reciprocal eye contact, the joint attention, the coos, the giggles, the "We're in it together." sort of vibe. As a result, the withdrawal happens on both sides. In fact, if you do therapy on the child, if you connect with the child and show them how to do all these things, and then you videotape how parent and child interacts, the interactions get much better. Just working on the child end improves the quality of the interaction between parent and child. So it's not your fault. It's a twist of brain development. Autistic children are cats in the world of dogs, a little bit more aloof, a little bit more standoffish.

[00:01:26]But although it's not your fault, it is your responsibility because we're not refrigerator moms.

[00:01:32]And we're not saints, either. We're not superheroes. We're human.

[00:01:35]We have tools. We always have to be offering connection, building connection in a way that they'll accept.

[00:01:41]Because we try, we try, and we try again, and sometimes it works.

[00:01:46]Thinking bio.