In the 1950s-1960s, Autism was blamed on bad and detached mothers, dubbed “refrigerator mothers”. This sprouted from the theories of Leo Kanner, where he described autistic children as being reared in emotional refrigerators due to lack of parental warmth. However, he studied this in a small population of white, educated families that displayed this detachment, making his assumption incorrectly over-generalized. Regardless, Kanner’s “refrigerator mother” theory prevailed for a long time, pushed into the limelight by popular professor Bruno Bettelheim’s public endorsement.