To think there needs to be a public inquiry into child development

I agree with this and everything else on the thread.

IMP most of it is shitty parenting/absent parenting (eg too much time in childcare) and screens.

the number of babies who are forward facing in a buggy and the parent pushing has earphones in…and wonder why there is a speech delay?! No one is ever told no, parents can’t take any perceived criticism of themselves and their child.

I don’t agree re sleep though OP; the idea that children and babies should sleep through the night is a few hundred years old.
biologically they aren’t supposed to for a while.

My neighbours have a three year old and she’s been sung to and spoken to so much every day by her parents ( Both work)
They have a second child and are always talk to the children- it’s lovely to hear.
Little girl has great vocabulary abs is bilingual.
No screens there used as dummies to keep kids quiet.
Screens are really bad for kids in my opinion

Sure Start was brilliant, my ex had a niece who went to her local one with her little one and it totally changed her and the way she inteacted with her child. She made friends and became far more confident and her parenting benefitted. If they had been around when I was a young mum I would have been there regularly.

One of my dc was diagnosed with ASD and in urgent need of SALT. We had to wait 6 months for the initial assessment - this was 18 months ago and still waiting for a block of therapy. We were told they don’t go into schools either now. Same with OT - we’ve been waiting 12 months - so this won’t be helping dc as the problem is nationwide with waiting times. Not to even mention the CAMHS crisis

This is controversial but I think we have very low expectations for our children a lot of the time and we never allow them to be bored so when there is a bit of a lull they don’t know what to do with themselves and so create havoc instead.

We go to quite an old fashioned church. There is no Sunday school so all the children attend with their parents from babyhood and without fail they are all able to sit on their seat and quietly colour in/ fiddle with a few toys for an hour by the time they are 5 (even the ND kids like my son) because that is what is expected of them all their life and they’ve practiced it every week from birth. Afterwards they have to interact with people of all ages and backgrounds who come and speak to them so they learn social skills from that too.
Less and less people go to church now and even then most churches have children’s sections but I can’t really think of any other environment where kids can learn this. Even when I was at school there were more opportunities to learn this as my daughter’s school doesn’t even have assemblies anymore and they are rarely sitting at a desk. Now kids are never expected to be bored as if there is any down time then they are given a phone to amuse them as many kids seem to get anxious and don’t know what to do with themselves otherwise.
We also have more stuff and expectations even from 30 years ago. Things that would have been a treat are now just expectations so I think some kids are genuinely shocked if they are told no to something so kick off.

I can only comment about the children I know so that makes my response purely qualitative. I have a couple of friends with teenagers and they both have had struggles with their mental health. I think lockdown contributed to this, one missed out on a smooth transition from primary to secondary school and the other was awarded their CCSEs by assessment and this impacted on their already shaky self esteem. Both of them have had to wait an incredibly long time to be seen by CAMHS which does not help matters. We need to really invest in the mental wellbeing of our young people I think all children and indeed most adults' mental health took a major hit during the pandemic and we are seeing the consequences now. Another friend has an almost 3 year old who is just an utter delight, full of fun and hitting all their milestones and my neighbours has three little ones who all seem to be fine. I think the use of screens and smart phones does impact on the formation of neural pathways at crucial stages of development but that is just my opinion and sometimes I wonder if it is just me being old fashioned. I do think that parenting in this day and age is very challenging

This garbage again, it always the parents fault isn't it. There's more non verbal children now as there's next to zero nhs salt intervention. Nhs salt discharged my son at 5, as they couldn't support him further apparently. We asked for an alternative communication aid which they refused. The school did nothing either. He only started communicating functionally when we decided to home school and implement the communication aid ourselves. The system is a disgrace and it makes children more disabled than they should be. For the record he doesn't watch TV at all and believe it or not I talk and spend time with him all day everyday. Not all parents with special needs children neglect them.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it isn’t just the stress of life and full time work for both parents, but the whole world has changed in general that contributes to this decline in child mental health.

On the whole children don’t play outside as much anymore, they are more likely to play on their computer and partake in social media. Parents are super stressed at work and exhausted with general life, and so more likely to hand children a tablet during free time. I am not criticising - I am also guilty of this, and this seems to be the norm.

Because of this trend, children are more likely to have poor communication and attention skills as well as more aggression depending on what games they are exposed to. They are less likely to show the skills needed in school to be able to concentrate and learn, leading to general detachment from studies and general aggressive behaviour which might stem from frustration.

It sounds awful, but I am hoping that this is just a bad trend and that this would be investigated and rectified.

Modern life is different for children today.
Society is letting kids down.

Cuts in services/lack of proper funding (NHS, education, Sure start etc)
A capitalist society where both parents have to work and are under financial pressures.
Cost of living crisis
An outdated, highly pressured education system which doesn’t allow for play and a proper childhood.

Too easy to put the blame on families when this government have trashed quality of life.

Hitler had that idea of “Cleansing “ A T-4 programme of mass euthanasia of anyone not productive or who was mentally or physically Ill or disabled.

Shame he didn’t off himself eh.

The diagnostic criteria for ASD was broadened and the thresholds became lower., particularly if using ICD criteria and not DSM.

Which is a contributing factor to the rise in child and adult diagnosis.

And the acute rise I referrals for ASC and ADHD assessments meant the NHS system couldn't cope so more inexperienced assessors in the NHS and poorer assessments from private assessments making ££££ happen.

Parents get off bloody tiktok and Parent your children ffs

Apologises if mentioned already but the age people are having children has increased. I never really hear it mentioned much as a cause for why there could be an increase in ASD though it’s accepted that older parents are more likely to have children with issues.

Decline in quality of diet has lead to overall health and mental health tanking.

Take a look at Georgia Ede outlining the effects of our current diet on mental health. She does not explicitly say in this talk how it effects kids, but in her book she has some very striking anecdotes about how diet changes behavior in kids.

I forgot to add the issue of sAHP and childcare.

I work very full time but I have excellent childcare and I’m now in a leadership role where I’m supervising the work of others, not actually doing the work myself. That is a huge shift for me because I’m taking calls after work, not actually spending hours working. I also have full time childcare/housekeper. She is young not as qualified as I would like but she is excellent with the children. No it’s not cheap but when I see what my sister is going through in the UK trying to hire a nanny for the children, it’s absolutely ridiculous.

The tax code doesn’t support any of this. My disposable income is low because I pay for this support. It’s not right I get no tax breaks and I’m paying about 55% income tax by the time you include all the various taxes. I have two children sharing a room and the 3rd is in my walk in wardrobe. I make a very high wage. I shouldn’t have to live like this but my commute is short, I get 9mim extra with the children each day.

Good quality childcare matters but now it’s so expensive we are going to see many more families leaving children unattended at home or being looked after by elder family, which research has shown to be less than ideal.

I know of a lot of very MC families - both parents professionals and their dc are unable to go to school etc - they can afford private care but they still have the same issues I really don’t think it’s solely down to parenting or poverty issues

I agree we have lost our sense of community and there are too many parents who are angered by the thought of another adult telling off their child, I've seen it in action. As a result children grow up with little respect for adults because they know their parents will back them up however badly they've behaved. Teachers have little authority, police are powerless. Like the OP I despair thinking of the future state of our country.

This report has a chart going back to 2007. It looks clear to me that in the early part of the 00s, we were getting to a good place with recognising and supporting SEND and then all the cuts/austerity came in and diagnosis numbers went massively down, as well as provision and support. But the numbers of pupils needing such support, logically they didn't go away, did they? They were still there but not being given the required support. Now it looks like numbers are rising massively but they aren't really if you look at this chart - they are catching up to where they were previously. So I think if there was to be an inquiry the first question needs to be whether numbers are actually rising or whether we are simply recognising better. (I understand that the numbers actually say "it's both").

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64930eef103ca6001303a3a6/Special_educational_needs_and_disability_an_analysis_and_summary_of_data_sources.pdf

Worth noting that SEND does not only include diagnosed disabilities and learning disorders - it also includes SEMH (social, emotional and mental health) which used to be called things like "behavioural needs" and "disadvantaged background" - basically, it's covering any pupils who are likely to need extra support in school whether that's because they have a learning support need like dyslexia or they struggle with school due to having missed a lot of school, or because their home life is stressful or because they have never been given positive role models, as well as issues like ASD and ADHD and more profound disabilities ie pupils who would never have been in mainstream schools.

The Warnock report is a good one to look at too. This was from 1978 and estimated that 20-25% of all pupils would need some form of SEN support. So these numbers aren't new. Some history/development since Warnock here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2019.00164/full

What actually seems to be the case is that up to the early 1990s or so, all of these issues existed but they weren't very visible to the average person. There were absolutely institutions, there were a lot more special schools, children may have been kept at home (similar to today) if it was felt they "couldn't cope" with school, but also it seems like pupils in older age ranges were largely left to it - it's hard for me to know because I was too young, but there are anecdotes all over - pupils truanting and a letter was written to the parents, but the pupil intercepted it easily so their parents never knew. Children were left to their own devices a lot more and it was seen as their own responsibility. Pupils not passing exams but it was not seen as a societal issue but a personal failure of the pupil. There are adults today who left school, legally, of age, with no qualifications but in those days nobody was totting it up for a spreadsheet and reporting it in the newspaper. It was taken for granted that some pupils wouldn't pass exams.

It seems to me like people saying "It's too expensive, we can't support such a high number, we need to know why the numbers are increasing so much!" are saying that it was better in the days when we just ignored that middle section of SEN pupils and we should go back to not trying to meet their needs at all.

The key thing is austerity.

14 years of austerity has cut things that help children like sure starts youth clubs, it has cut council bridges and it has cut education budget. It has impacted the nhs. We now have more homeless children that has an impact on child development. We also have wage stagnation which means parents are often working longer and in really terrible jobs mean they can't be better as much for their children.

The inquiry should be on austerity the root cause.

this post really resonates with me.
I carry out screening assessments for ADHd and ASD and work with children who have these diagnoses too. Especially with ADHD, there is frequently a substantial degree of developmental trauma in their history, which makes me (privately and not openly) wonder
at how the diagnosis was reached.
They wouldn't have gone beyond an initial screening with me. Almost all have come from challenging backgrounds with shared care, blended families, acrimonious divorce and a need for their behaviour to be explained elsewhere. When it's clear and obvious that they're deeply disturbed by their experiences of early parenting and trauma. But nobody wants to talk about it.

This is all so true