Abstract
The relationship between parental personality characteristics and infantile autism has been viewed in various ways. When demonstrable personality characteristics or psychopathology are found in parents of autistic children, one interpretation of these results is that autism in the child is the result of the parents’ deviant personality characteristics. Within interpretation, there are a number of different hypotheses. An version is that deviant parents have created autism in a biologically normal child as a result of their isolation, coldness, rage, psychosis, etc. Goldfarb (1961) felt that this conceptualization was appropriate for only one subgroup of autistic children. Neurological impairment was seen as the primary etiological agent in the other subgroup. From Goldfarb’s point of view, deviant parents are only associated with a portion of the autistic children. A different parental-biological interaction hypothesis states that deviant parents exacerbate psychological abnormalities in children with special biological vulnerabilities. These parents may have failed to provide adequate support for the biologically vulnerable infant because of inadequate child-rearing practices. Thus, demonstrable personality characteristics have been interpreted as the cause of autistic development in the child.
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© 1978 Plenum Press, New York
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McAdoo, W.G., DeMyer, M.K. (1978). Personality Characteristics of Parents. In: Rutter, M., Schopler, E. (eds) Autism. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0787-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0787-7_17
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