In 1967, Clara Claiborne Park, an American college English teacher, published one of the first parent memoirs about raising a child with autism, “The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child.”

Park wrote about her daughter’s experience with autism at a time when autism was little understood, and common wisdom based on Bruno Bettelheim’s theories attributed responsibility to family pathology, led by the refrigerator mother, a label based on the belief that autistic behaviors are the result of a child closing their conscious self off from extreme family conflict and the emotional frigidity of the child’s mother.