To think lots of badly behaved children are getting passed as SEN

Better diagnosis/awareness
Less facilities for Sen children so more in mainstream
More Sen kids attending school
Harder being nd in todays society

Are there more people self diagnosing themselves and kids? Yes probably.

Is the assessment process inaccurate? No it's very thorough imo. Highly unlikely scores of children are being wrongly diagnosed

Another who agrees with you. There's a lot of lazy parenting going on and you see it mirrored in threads on here.

Of course your friend's DC have never ever been pushed or mistreated by children who don't have SEN...?

Do you have an issue with the numbers of pupils identified by schools as needing SEN support or who have got EHCPs? Or do you have a problem with parents who claim their child has a special education need but the school and health care professionals don't support that, and the parents aren't interested in pushing for a diagnosis or support? Because they're very different things and you have described them both.

I agree with you.

Agree with PPs that we have more tools and knowledge now than we did back then. I am same age group as you OP and I personally know people that struggled in school / got excluded / didn't go in to higher education as they didn't have the right support at the time. Perhaps if they had instead of being called naughty and disruptive, maybe they'd have fonder memories of school and had better education.

I do however have to agree with OP around jumping to diagnose kids for behaviour that may be entirely normal. I see it on MN all the time - 'does my kid have X Y Z' or when I speak with other mums every child seems to be getting assessments. I think as a society we love to label.

Yeah I agree.

Also being neurodivergent in itself isn't a special need.

This isn't to say that special needs don't exist or aren't increasing (and I do think they are) but being a bit different or lacking attention or anxious is not necessarily something that needs medicalising or certifying.

Yes, a hard agree with you OP

YANBU!

Im so tired of people trying to excuse rude/bad behaviour this way.

there are lots of us with SEN kids who have had a lot of judgement from others who put it down to bad parenting. You are not qualified to decide whose child is or isn't a child with SEN. Though I understand your frustration with parents of undiagnosed children claiming it with no.evidence.
We need to be looking at why so many.children are being diagnosed imo. And trying to see if there is a way of mitigating the rise .

We're better at diagnosing it now. No one in my school was diagnosed as SEN, but I look back and I can think of loads of kids that either had adhd or ASD. So if the same knowledge we have now was applied then, the stats would be high.

Yanbu. We are giving medical names to normal variation in people basically, eg shyness must be wrong, being active must be wrong, being anything other than perfect

I think we are much better at recognising neurodivergence now than we were.

There will of course be children whose behaviour is simply normal for their age and development and some whose behaviour is more challenging than other children their age.

When we are challenged by something we try and explain it, we can also try and externalise it rather than turning inward to look for our role.

Resilience is very low for a lot of children these days, the reasons for that are endless.

Recognising challenging behaviour and working with the parent and child to try and understand it and support it is really important. Being on the SEND register does not mean necessarily a diagnosis, note a recognition of additional support needs.

I have a child with sen and I agree with you.

1 in 4 in my sons class are....

So firstly the kids that hurt your friends’ kids at school may actually have SEN. That’s a separate conversation.

But yes I do think there is now a rush to pathologise entirely normal behaviour, in both children and adults. And then I see a lot of kids at work who are not particularly well behaved and their parents say ‘oh well they’re probably ADHD/PDA/ODD’ when there are no signs of this, and when actually getting to know the child well and disciplining in a relationships based way rather than just being punitive is really effective.

YANBU

Where are you getting your stats of 1 in 4 from