Mothers and Autism: The Evolution of a Discourse of Blame

Abstract

Study says cost of autism more than cancer, strokes or heart disease" [1].This was one of many "screamer" headlines announcing new research on the cost to the UK and US economies of lifespan care for people with autism spectrum conditions [2].Lost in media examinations [3,4] of these 2014 cost estimates-which can be misleading, since only a small minority of people with autism ever receive the "ideal" services on which the cost estimates were based-was that they were predicated on the assumption that mothers of children with autism work less and purchase large packages of services, many of which are not supported by evidence and may be more costly than services shown to be effective.This is one topic around which autism's past intersects with its present.The current expectation of full-time, "professional" autism parenting is rooted in a discourse of mother blaming persistently woven into the history of autism, even before the condition was named and defined.This history begins with a moral panic over the behavior of the urban poor.A new notion of middle-class childhood that arose at the end of the nineteenth century, characterized by pampering, protection, and education, fostered fears over "troublesome" children: children with disabilities or low intellectual ability, street children, and juvenile delinquents.Children in these categories were targeted by a child-saving movement funded by the upper class and staffed by the middle class, particularly middle-class women.United in their vision that poverty, immorality, and antisocial behavior could best be attacked by reshaping childhood, these "child savers" undertook myriad initiatives: compulsory education, settlement houses, juvenile courts, reform schools, welfare departments, child protection organizations, and research centers focused on child psychology, psychiatry, behavior, and criminology [5,6].The child-saving institutions most relevant to later treatment of autism were child research facilities and the Child Guidance movement, which sought to put research findings into practice.In 1922 the Commonwealth Fund boosted the campaign to prevent delinquency by underwriting demonstration programs at American Child Guidance clinics for children with emotional and behavior problems as well as those believed to have criminal tendencies, and by spreading the use of standardized

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