to ask this without expecting a backlash?

When I was at school, there were "Remedial" classes, but behaviour was nowhere near as bad as it seems to be nowadays and teachers didn't need to differentiate lessons like they have to now.

Up until the 1950s, the theory of teaching and learning was fairly constant. In the last 75 years educational theory and ed psych have really started to be studied, and new and different theories been formed. The idea of differentiating lessons for different learning styles or needs only really started catching on in the 90s.

I also don't remember any school refusers. Is this a new mental health symptom, or are children more autonomous and possibly less resilient nowadays?

I suspect that this is true. Childrearing styles have come and gone in and out of fashion, and discipline and conformity were prioritised more in yours and my childhoods.

I do think that the current fashion for gentle parenting is a good thing in general, but it does seem to produce children who have much less resilience. The pandemic had such a huge effect, although the lack of resilience was in evidence well before then. I suspect that academisation, and the ways in which academies run things, also has an effect.

When I look back at my peers at school, I can list a number of people who I now believe were autistic or had ADHD (including me!). VERY few of us had a diagnosis at the time, it just wasn't that common. We were labelled fidget-bums, gifted, tlazy, disorganised, or that awkward kid who got bullied, etc.

There was a boy in my class when I was 8 or 9 who the teacher shouted at all the time. I was best friends with his cousin and she told me he "wasn't normal". The next day at leaving time I stayed behind to tell my teacher that I found out "Danny" isn't normal so not to yell at him anymore. She smacked my bottom and told me wetting my pants wasn't normal either (I've had bladder issues my whole life). I agree, I wasn't "normal" in that respect but I didn't get shouted at for it. Poor Danny was constantly being shouted at and I felt so bad for him.

Exactly this.

I’m around about 10 years older than OP and I have autism and ADHD. The stress of masking for over 50 yews has had a huge toll. I am now too unwell to work.

Neuodivergence runs in families. DC2 is diagnosed. DM and her dad almost certainly have/had ADHD and autism.

I'm 62 and would now be called a school refuser. I suffered from terrible panic attacks and would leave lessons 'feeling ill' and sometimes be so shaken that I couldn't get into school for a day or so. It was a horrible time and I sometimes wonder how it might have been dealt with, and what difference that would have made to me. I did my O and A Levels, went to university but missed too many lectures (even got there but backed out at the door several times) and was told to go at the end of the first year. I wonder if I might have made it through with a bit more pastoral care, l'll never know and it doesn't matter, I had a decent career regardless. Just because it wasn't noticed or named doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Ditto! My brother was treated exactly the same.

Way back people were put into mental health institutions as insane or prison, if they didn't ascribe to the "norm" way back before spectrum psychological studies began giving tags for behaviour.
Then again we're living in a completely different era now and there's so many more studies I'd say everyone is on a spectrum at some level.
Analyse that @Fleurflowering?
And of course people are unclear about real life because they're stuck on screens.

I absolutely agree with this.

For school refusers.. you could just leave at 14. My parents both did.
For autism.. it was barely recognised except in extreme cases where they were put in institutions. For the less extreme, they would have been the weird kids, the ones with hardly any friends who did train spotting
Adhd.. these were the naughty kids kept in line with fear of the cane or slipper and eventually expelled.
Even right into the 80s, parents would smack their children, and if you were naughty at school you might come home and get a smack. So i guess fear kept a lot of kids in line too.
There was less or no psychology applied to schools, it was do or be punished. Now its child centred and there are not really any punishments apart from a detention and eventually being expelled. Which is obviously good but also makes it much harder to keep 32 kids in line.

Oh this is me, absolutely similar to your mum. I am very certain I have undiagnosed ADHD and am constantly losing things and forgetting about appointments or general life admin. It does become pretty wearing and very frustrating for my poor DH and children 😂😳

My DD has autistic traits. In addition to the factors mentioned above, I wonder if modern teaching styles and standards of behaviour in schools may also be an issue. My experience (limited, I know) is that my DD struggled to cope with group work, noise and poor behaviour (generally, not just from ND children) in her classes, whereas I suspect that the environment when I was at school, where group work was pretty unknown, classrooms were generally quiet and there was generally pretty strict discipline and routine, would have suited her particular needs better.

I also wonder if the physical fabric of modern schools, with lots of hard and noisy surfaces and bright lights, might be making it harder for ND children to cope.

Yes, it existed, but it wasn't recognised.

I struggled a great deal, but I was very academic and reasonably well behaved, so nobody cared. It was many years later that I was diagnosed with adhd, but the symptoms were there all along.

Looking back, I can see that there were quite a few other kids with varying types of neurodivergence. Including one girl in my year who sadly died by suicide at the age of 18. With hindsight, it is blindingly obvious that she had ASD. At the time, she was simply described as "weird". It is more than 30 years ago now, but I feel so sad when I reflect on how badly she was let down by the whole system.

My mom, born 1950, didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD until she was 59. Decades ago, lots of women with ADHD were dismissed as ditzy scatterbrains, and the ones who weren’t were working many times harder than everyone else to reach the same level of success. My mom was a SAHM with an only child, so you’d think day-to-day life wouldn’t be that challenging, but she was always losing things and leaving chores half-finished around the house. Sometimes out of nowhere, she’d gasp and say, “I was supposed to go to my doctor’s appointment/lunch with Mary/that parent volunteer meeting today! Oh my God - “ And then she’d start phoning people to apologize and reschedule.

I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 22. My kids got diagnosed when they were 8 and 6. Their childhoods are totally different from mine because the adults around them know about their needs, and they aren’t growing up feeling inadequate.

Yes. Autism did exist. Looking back I can say with absolute confidence the kids who had it. My sister is 53, she’s been dinginess as an adult withnADHD, looking back on her time at school and school reports, it’s plain as day that she has it.

My aunt has been a teacher for 35 years and says that ND was always there in similar numbers to now, it just wasn’t diagnosed.

Goady thread though. I have only been on here for half an hour tonight and this is the third questionable ND thread I’ve seen. They always come in waves. 🤔

@Fleurflowering I still have the uni dissertation I wrote on autism in 1983. I tried to visit a specialist autistic school in my home town, but there was a very long waiting list to go as a 'research visitor'. (My dissertation was OK for its time, but is now horribly out of date).

I’m a similar age to you, and remember we had the ‘remedial’ kids at school. These tended to jbe the slow learners.

I don’t remember autism being around. There was a growing awareness of E-numbers and hyperactivity.

I remember the first time I heard of ADHD. It was late ‘90s and in a newspaper article, and I was at work. The symptoms listed seemed to be common to most children.

Now we are all grown up, it’s obvious which adults have adhd, and many of us are all the autistic spectrum. I guess we found coping mechanisms at school to combat it.

This in spades.👍

I was born in 1974. I was the strange, smart girl. The very strange, very smart girl. Today girls like me get diagnosed with autism.

thank goodness because being that girl was hard.

Half and half really. There were definitely kids that had ASD/ADHD back in my day when these things didn’t formally exist to diagnose. However, it was more ‘clear cut’ back then with people in ‘groups’.

-what was deemed classic autism back in the day, which was extremely obvious and those kids went to ‘special school’. Unfortunately back then special needs were not really differentiated and people didn’t want to understand. Our local ‘special school’ was called ‘Xxx School for the Retarded’ (that was its actual name and I have just identified it for privacy of location’. It had kids with both developmental and physical disabilities. So, for example, kids with cerebral palsy, who were completely capable of learning in a mainstream school were put there, lumped in with kids with classic autism and none of them were really taught anything.

-kids who were just ‘weird’ but not weird enough to be sent to the special school. They tended to be shunned and isolated due to behaviours, and were not given educational support they required, so literally shoved in a corner socially and educationally. Now we would support as ASD.

-kids who were ‘naughty’ or ‘didn’t pay attention’. They tended to just be punished, and often left school illiterate and innumerate, and went on to manual labour jobs. Now we would support as ADHD.

-kids who were quirky, but rubbed along socially (tended to find a similar quirky tribe) and educationally (some excelled, some didn’t), and generally left school to go onto uni or other work. Now we would support as ASD.

I think it’s the last two groups where things have changed. They were always group that just rubbed along at school and then in life to varying degrees. Now every second person is in these groups and society tells them all sorts of things because they are different. If you take people in my profession, looking at people my age, there would be LOTS of folk that would have been diagnosed as ASD if that had of existed when we were kids or even as adults starting a career. Most surgeons and anaesthetists of my generation would definitely have ramped it in. However, people just got in with it. I would say the incidence of people now coming through is the same, but the difference is they all believe they have something wrong with them, and have spent their lives to that point with everyone telling them they can’t just ‘get on with it’ but they need this, that, and the other to survive which has resulted in a self fulfilling prophecy and zero resilience.

The problem is also that the buckets have been screwed up so now everyone has ASD. I have a child who was diagnosed Asperger’s quite a while before it ceased to exist. All of their friends were also. Now they are told they have autism, and society now treats them as special needs. None of them believe it and all will tell you they don’t have autism. It’s not that they believe they are any better or worse than someone who does, just different. We have a close family friend with a (now adult) child with autism who can’t speak intelligibly, has severe behavioural issues, is not toilet trained and had to be institutionalised when old enough. My child doesn’t relate to this at all and does not believe they have the same thing (and yes, even taking the ‘spectrum’ into account). They consider it entirely different and believe it’s like someone putting people with asthma and people with diabetes together and saying ‘now you all have asthma’. I also believe if they had of been told and treated as though they had autism when diagnosed, none of them would now be as they are in life and certainly not doing the jobs they do. They would likely all be sitting in disability, believing they couldn’t do things.

I went to a huge comprehensive in the 70s. There were lads who were disruptive and I suspect not NT. There were also people who were borderline learning disabled.

Also (and I can see why it can be confusing) but autism and ADHD are neurodevelopmental conditions, not mental health issues. For example, a meltdown in autism usually comes from sensory overwhelm or difficulty processing their environment. A similar outburst in someone with poor mental health might be a reaction to stress or a difficult home life. Behaviours can look the same but the causes are very different. Other posters can correct me if I’m wrong but I believe neurodivergence is largely nature whereas some mental health challenges result from nurture.

I was also born in 1978.

The Labour government brought in the SEND Act in 2021. This is when mainstream education was expected to include a much broader range of children. Before that children with any kind of additional need were educated separately.
Yes, we have SEND settings now, but the vast majority of children with additional needs are educated in the mainstream alongside their peers.
There were children in my village who went to special school, it wasn't even a possibility they would have gone to our school. Nowadays many of these children would be in mainstream.

Thank goodness we don't hide children away these days and pretend they don't exist.

I'm older than you. I wasn't diagnosed autistic till five years ago. I was clever at school but really struggled socially. We were the lost girls. I was so unhappy as a child and teen because I just didn't fit in.

As some pp have mentioned children with any form of disability or special ed need rarely went to mainstream school but I can still pinpoint several kids in my year who definitely had adhd and a couple with autism. Maybe nit school refusers but definitely serial truants!
Within our local area there were 2 special needs schools (in quite a small area) where kids who I saw out and about went. They were possibly higher needs asd.
The difference now is many special schools have shut. We now have 2 in our large authority which means many children who would have attended are now in mainstream schools so are more visible.
My Dsis works at a day centre for adults, some 18, some late 60s who have never attended a mainstream schools due to their needs.
Another relative, nearly 70 has struggled much of his life, labelled 'thick and stupid ' he hated school and would nick off . He has recently been recognised (not fully diagnosed - no point now , his words but has taken several online assessments and discussed with his doctor ) with both asd and adhd. He is 'grieving ' for the life he has missed out, that he could have had .
So yeah it has always been about but those children with the most severe special needs weren't 'seen'.

I believe it’s always been around just the same, we just understand and recognise it these days. Those kids that would have been labelled quirky, odd, shy, naughty, troubled ect, may have been on the spectrum. Of course those things can just personality traits, but it’s important not to dismiss it as a possibility. I think they say 1 in 5 children are neurodivergent. So, in a class of 30, that’s 5 children (statistically) that’s actually quite a lot……

In a nutshell, autistic people have always existed just the same as today. It just feels like there’s more autism because it’s more known about, mainstream.