I observed a mother of an adopted baby girl induce autism on her daughter by blocking any emotional bonding with her daughter and critical discipline of all emotional expression.
It was very sad as the girl is now 16 and on so many drugs she has never gone through the childhood stages of development.
The “refrigerator mother” theory of causation was so thoroughly condemned that no researcher wanted to risk their reputation on studying the influence of mother-child bonding, or lack thereof.
Decades of research into a possible causal link between children increasingly raised in daycare and an increase in autism diagnoses never got done, perhaps at the cost of seriously hindering the development of effective treatment and prevention.