PORTLAND, Oregon—There was a time when America confidently blamed “refrigerator mothers” for autism. If you’re too young to remember that grotesque chapter, let me summarize it for you: for decades, respected experts believed autism was caused by emotionally cold mothers who failed to bond properly with their children. Entire families were shattered by this theory. Mothers were blamed, children were institutionalized, and professionals spoke with absolute certainty about what autism was and where it came from. And they were catastrophically wrong.
That history matters right now because we are standing at another fork in the road in our understanding of autism—especially profound autism and non-speaking autism—and once again the institutions are behaving with the same certainty they displayed before. The modern version of the old assumption goes something like this:
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