On ADHD, maternal blame and the infrastructure of ideas that defines us

Stressed mothers aren't causing their children to develop ADHD. It's a harmful idea, and we can't let it lie.

I have a piece out in Mother Jones, online today and in the magazine soon. It’s about something that has been worrying me for years, a new take on an old idea about what a mother must be and the harm she does to her children if she fails to live up to the ideal.

Specifically, it’s about a claim made by Dr. Gabor Maté, the bestselling author of The Myth of Normal, that ADHD is not an inherited condition but rather the result of stressed parents—mothers, really—causing their sensitive babies to “tune out,” changing their brains and creating the symptoms described as ADHD. The idea echoes another theory popular in the mid-20th century that said autism was caused by a mother’s inability to love her child properly.

You can read more at Mother Jones about the history of the refrigerator mother theory, how Maté’s theory revives it, and how it is unsupported by science, plus his response. I want to say a bit more here about Maté’s rhetoric on ADHD and why it’s harmful.

There is much about Maté’s work that I respect, specifically his stalwart advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people. I tried for months to get in touch with him while reporting this piece, through his agent and his website. He responded to my very last attempt, when the story was already edited and on the page, nearly ready for print. I was able to incorporate his responses to specific points in the text, but then Maté and I continued to correspond by email after the window for edits had closed.

We traded studies, debated our perspectives and, while there are many points on which we agree—that the mental health of caregivers matters, for starters— we acknowledged that on this point we likely wouldn’t change one another’s minds.

He maintained that his theory is not about blaming mothers. “How is pointing out that this neoliberal society imposes stresses on people, including young families and mothers, tantamount to blaming anyone?” he wrote. “Who chooses to be stressed or depressed or to carry multigenerational trauma?  Or to be poor? Or racialzied?”

I argued that, if the goals is to improve family well-being, we can focus on the need for better postpartum care or the right to a living wage, and the well-studied effects of not having those things, without telling mothers that being stressed—inevitable at some point during parenthood—will trigger ADHD in their child.

When I see clips on social media of Maté telling Steven Bartlett on Diary of a CEO that, if Bartlett’s friend has ADHD, surely his parents were stressed, or when I watch as he tells Mel Robbins that if a child is raised in “optimal conditions,” they won’t develop ADHD, I think about a struggling new parent holding an infant on their chest and worrying about how they may already have damaged their child’s brain. I think about the mother whose child has just received an ADHD diagnosis wondering what they did wrong, where they strayed from the optimal.

I worry about what it means to perpetuate the idea that ADHD is something that can be avoided through perfection, that should be avoided—a prospect that should worry anyone who is or who loves a person with ADHD. And I have a broader concern, about what this rhetoric can do in a society, what it has always done.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Early in reporting this piece, I stumbled upon the work of Ashley Mattheis, a lecturer on digital media and culture at the University of Manchester in England. Mattheis studies extremism and gendered ideology, and often how they overlap. Before she got her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she worked in telecommunications. Her dissertation, on “fierce mothering” (think “mama grizzlies” and also Moms Rising) and motherhood as a tool for cultural hegemony, included a metaphor that compares our cultural concept of motherhood to telephone lines. Or, rather, to the massive telecommunications infrastructure present in almost every place where we live and work and travel, yet practically invisible, our minds mostly passing over it without notice because it’s always there, it has always been there.

Over the years, telecomm technologies have been rolled out one on top of the other—telegraph wires then telephone lines then coaxial cable then fiber optic lines— across the same poles or pathways, creating layers of redundancy where functions of older technologies are accessible if needed, Mattheis told me. That redundancy gives communications systems stability and security, as an always-there but mostly invisible part of the world around us.

Likewise, generation after generation of mothering ideals have been layered one on top of another, each new concept—moral motherhood then scientific motherhood then intensive mothering—offering a sense of freshness within a stable infrastructure designed to recede from our awareness. Old ideas available as needed, Mattheis writes.

Is it any wonder that as more parents start to look up and see the modern motherhood ideal—to really see it—conservatives are falling back on old ideals, ones that have proven stable and efficient in the past, ones that have been there all along.

Integral to an ideal is shame.

The refrigerator mother theory was a warning, during the height of Second Wave feminism when more women were joining the workforce, about what could happen to a child if a mother fails to perform to the ideal, to attach with just the right kind of warmth. Advocates said they weren’t trying to blame mothers, but rather advocating for what was best for the child, even as they often recommended that child be removed from the mother, the source of harm, and put into institutional care.¹

I don’t think Maté is wittingly bolstering and promoting the legacy infrastructure of the maternal ideal. I think he believes, in many facets of his work, that he may be doing just the opposite.

But from my place here on the ground, where I am raising two kids in a neurodiverse family, where the lines above my head or below my feet trace connections between my home and my neighbors’ and our school and our doctor’s office and our workplaces and the State House and the White House and beyond, his claims about ADHD—clipped for social media and repackaged by others—feel like a warning, too.

1. For more on the refrigerator mother theory, I highly recommend the work of Marga Vicedo and specifically her book Intelligent Love.