n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother”>Refrigerator Mother theory demonstrated.
Autism and TV
Written by
in
Comments
-
Pitiful stuff. I guess it’s what people do when they want to make claims about the real world, but they haven’t the tools, time or energy to go sample it themselves. There’s always someone else’s data to use as a proxy for what they’re interested in. If they’d kept their conclusions tentative, it would have been okay, but asserting causality is ridiculous. They seem to believe they’ve been able to grasp all the variables that could possibly influence these data from the safety of their keyboards. Given such omniscience, it’s a wonder they even bothered to crunch any numbers….
-
Somehow, though, despite increasing evidence that autism has a strong genetic component, it’s always more satisfying to blame the parents – as Bruno Bettelheim’s notorious Refrigerator Mother theory demonstrated.
Actually, a significant faction of parents also prefer to blame something other than genetics, so long as it doesn’t have to do with rearing. An example is vaccines, and more recently environmental pollution and so forth. Of course, theories such as a role of TV or the “old dads” theory are completely rejected, despite their plausibility not being obviously worse to that of any other crazy theory people come up with.
Either way, I did write a critique of the TV hypothesis that actually explains the results presented.
Leave a Reply