Citation needed. This is not accurate without some aggressive hedging on what we're calling autistic. Lack of socialization does tend to manifest in less social behaviors later on. And less social behaviors are common among autistic people. But that's not the same as saying lack of socialization causes autism.
Neglect can cause a host of behavioral and neurological issues but they're not autism. Medical literature consensus is pretty clear on this. It was a popular theory many decades ago. It's not held up to scrutiny.
Autistic children are born not caring for faces, or eyes, and social interaction. Feral children do not have eyes or faces or social interaction to look at. So if it's not technically autism, it's not any different than the myriad of disorders currently lumped together as autism.
Since you seem to have no opposition to using personal definitions of things based on personal opinions without feeling the need to clarify, I'm glad you agree with me 100%
In this case, to be clear, pudding means productive.
Nobody said this was true for autism. Only that resulting misdiagnoses may be contributing to the uptick.
> If you leave a child alone with no human contact, it becomes autistic very quickly. So there's definitely types of autism that come from parenting.