I’m thinking right now of some of the techniques I’ve already learned for communication interactions, via the Hanen program and some work with Jim McDonald’s Communicating Partners. For me, learning about more effective patterns of interaction has definitely involved some level of critique of some of the patterns that parents often naturally fall into — for example, breaking ourselves of the habit of barraging our daughter with questions, or demanding “Say ‘banana,’ sweetie. Say ‘banana.’ C’mon, can you say ‘banana’?” or even just throwing too many words at her. My older daughter responded fine to an outpouring of words and requests; my younger daughter does not.

Seems to me that it ought to be possible to tell parents that they can learn to improve their interactions with their child, and that some communication and affect is more helpful than others, without arriving at the conclusion that the parents have somehow caused autism by using the wrong interactions or emphases. I didn’t pick up the blame-the-parents vibe at all from my first reading of Engaging Autism (admittedly over a year ago now), and I still don’t think I quite hear it in the Family Approach quotes you cite from Ch. 13. What I hear is “you can do this better,” rather than “it’s your fault for not doing it right in the first place.”

I’ll be on the lookout for those biases now, but I do think that relationship-based intensive therapy is going to be an excellent match for our kiddo, and that our whole family has a lot to learn about how to best help her.

I don’t think that Greenspan is the only “autism professional” whose work and treatment plan contains at least vestigial references to a Bettelheimian, “refrigerator mother” theory of autism. I have never met a parent (in my experience) who has not felt that Bettelheim’s ideas about parents causing autism were “outmoded” and “discredited”; it is from reading books like Greenspan’s and those of others that I have begun to wonder if these ideas are still out there, though not in the most obvious ways.

Greenspan’s theories are rather “messed”, for lack of a better term. His idea is that disorders are primarily caused by biological differences (which is, in my opinion, accurate) but are exacerbated by inadequate parenting styles. To be perfectly honest, that second bit is a load of crap.

I don’t deny that one’s parents have a lot to do with how one develops. My family and I were talking about this very thing at Christmas, and my brothers and I were actually asked to explain what we thought our parents did well and didn’t do so well when we were little.

My mother thinks that there wasn’t enough structure provided to us when we were small. My father thinks it was fine (”There was structure. They knew the rules, and we had set meal times.”). My brothers and I flourished in this “unstructured environment”. Perhaps more structure would have been good for us, since as it turns out I have ADHD and am having to learn to structure myself now that I am an adult, but the creative flow that lack of structure engendered cannot be given a proper value.

Your final three sentences disturb me profoundly.

We “neurotypicals” have much to learn from them, and my own spiritual development has been deeply informed by my work with this special population. Unfortunately, most (but not all) of the parents with whom I have worked simply have not shared my view, and most importantly, have been unwilling to reflect on themselves in any meaningful way. This closed and angry parental attitude, Dr. Chew, is what is truly destructive to children with autism.

I must ask, Joanne, if you are a believer in “Indigos” and “Crystals”?

Because if you are, I know that I need not waste any more of my time trying to speak sense into your perceptions of this work and Greenspan’s faulty theories.