Experiences of PDA / high anxiety pre 2000ish

[moveoverye]

I know that there has been an increase in diagnoses of autism and PDA and that ut’s generally agreed that these children’s needs simply were not being recognised and labelled as such before quite recently.

I’m thinking back to my Primary school years (and indeed secondary) and I can’t remember any children who displayed behaviours that today would be recognised as PDA (with the meltdowns and complete shutdown and refusal to do things.)

Where were they? Did they just not go to school? I imagine schools were much more demanding places (at least from what I remember in my primary there were no sensory breaks or nurture groups or social communication sessions etc) and as I can’t remember witnessing a single meltdown in my entire time at school (1990-2005) perhaps these children simply did not attend? Were special schools or homeschooling more common for these children?

If anyone here is a parent or teacher of a child pre 2000 who almost certainly in retrospect had PDA-profile autism (maybe even has had a diagnosis since as an adult), I would be so interested to know what life was like, what support was available, and how you coped?

Thinking back to my childhood - similar age to you - the boys on my street who had extra needs both went to special school. I think nowadays kids with that level of need, at least in one of the cases, would be in mainstream school.

You were a child with zero knowledge of autism when you were in primary school. I'm quite sure plenty happened that you didn't notice.

Quite possibly! Which is why I’m asking…

Interesting, I often wondered about this too

There were a lot more children taken out of mainstream school and placed in schools for kids with ‘social emotional and behavioural difficulties’

There were definitely some children in my primary 1995 ish that would be diagnosed these days, can’t say specifically PDA though.
I personally don’t think the demands of school were anything like they are today. We didn’t get homework in primary. We didn’t have test after test, we didn’t need to stay before and after school for SATs revision. I’m fairly certain school involved a lot more free / fun time than it does today.

That's not really true though is it because we would have noticed if someone in our class was having a meltdown, for example. We would be spending more time with a child than the teacher would.

Not PDA, but I'm certain my brother had ADHD. I remember my parents calling him hyperactive from a very young age. My mum had to take 6 months off work because of his behaviour at school, though he was never excluded. I don't think he was particularly badly behaved, just a fidget (which was his nickname!) and very talkative, so probably disruptive in that sense. His secondary school reports were the same - cheeky, talkative, no concentration, easily distracted etc. He dropped out of several college courses, went through several jobs. Sadly he took his own life at 23.

When my son was diagnosed with ADHD (though he has inattentive type) I talked to my mum about my brother. She said he was just "a naughty little boy" But then she also poo-pooed the idea of me being autistic. I'm diagnosed now.

I was at primary in the 80s and I remember a lot of free play in infants.
In juniors we did a lot of topic work where we could choose our focus. It did feel like we could learn at our own pace to some degree.

I don’t think we had as much pressure as children do at the moment which means it was easier for ND to cope at school.

Come to think of it, there was no such thing as TAs in our primary school

That's not really true though is it because we would have noticed if someone in our class was having a meltdown, for example. We would be spending more time with a child than the teacher would.

Maybe they were in the other class.

Maybe it happened before they even got to class, and me of mine rarely made it into her classroom.

Just maybe children pre 2000 didn't notice these things that they didn't know existed.

@KilljoysMakeSomeNoise I'm so sorry to hear that about your brother

Our education system now puts a huge amount of pressure on young children to fit into very specific boxes. The demands of the curriculum are huge and for ND children this can be really challenging.

Before 1998 there wasn't even a national curriculum. Primary school was a lot less pressured. Children who had needs were in special schools or written off as badly behaved and not even in school.

You don't remember children displaying these behaviours because they were most likely hidden away.

I have a child with PDA, and I think I was a bit like him, but to a much milder degree. I didn’t love school, but I certainly didn’t sob and plead and beat my head against the wall and beg my parents to kill me rather than make me go, as my son has done on and off since pre school.

A lot of my friends weren’t crazy about school, either, and many might be diagnosed autistic these days - deeply nerdy, obsessively interested in very niche things most people would find a bit dull, emotionally very young for their age, not fond of bathing, utterly uninterested in matters of social reputation or appearance, played a lot of D&D. But none of these kids suffered the kinds of extreme mental health issues we’re seeing these days.

Also, the world was so different then (80s and 90s) and I didn’t grow up in the U.K.

Kids weren’t scheduled within an inch of their lives from infancy onwards - there were none of these endless structured baby sensory / baby yoga / baby ballet / baby swimming / sing and sign / messy play groups everyone feels the need to drag babies and toddlers to these days. We didn’t learn to read and write until age 6, and there was no homework until age 8. We weren’t tested constantly at school. Nobody had formal swimming lessons until they were 6 or 7, unless they had relatives who lived by the sea.

Class sizes were smaller (the biggest class size at my school was 20). No school uniform or dress code. Nobody policed the contents of my lunch box, or confiscated my food, or tried to make me eat things I didn’t want to. (I lived on Pop Tarts and mustard sandwiches for years and nobody batted an eyelid).

Also: we didn’t have to do presentations in front of the whole class like kids have to do these days at a very young age. There weren’t group projects until we were in secondary school.

And of course there was no internet or social media.

There were just so many fewer explicit and implicit demands, and they were built up to much more gradually, with much more support.

I wonder now how I’d have coped, when I was very young, with all the structured activities and rapid transitions, the noisy, crowded environments, so many rules and so much competition everywhere. So many norms and ideals to compare myself to. So much information coming at me all the time. And so much forced interaction.

I don’t think there are more autistic people these days, I think the world has got a lot more crowded, and infinitely harder for anyone who struggles with executive function and sensory processing.

Oh my gosh you’re right!
There was actually a boy in the year below me in Primary who I think had some sort of developmental delay, and he had a TA. She was the only one in the school though, except for the nursery nurse!

I’m so sorry about your brother.

Do you have experiences to share from that time @brooksidebackside ?

Your replies are so interesting @Bunnyhair and @Pinkflipflop85. Kind of seems like even as we’ve been moving more towards a more inclusive education system …in theory… our classrooms have become more inhospitable and demanding for those with additional needs. Such a contradiction, I wonder how we ended up here?

I went to a school which was designated to take on "troubled" children who had been excluded from other schools, as well as the regular cohorts. There were a lot of children, especially boys, who I would say would probably be diagnosed today.

DS has / had a PDA profile and no way would he ever have been able to step into a mainstream primary school. No way.

He couldn’t cope with any toddler groups either.

He is at a specialised SEN placement and even then it was touch and go.

Kids with the PDA profile are still now often just not in school, any school. I’m not sure a lots changed for the better!

In my class of ~27 in 1990s secondary school there were 2-3 pupils who were on the register every lesson for years but we had hardly ever seen in person because they were long-term school refusers (as opposed to being in hospital for physical treatment of an illness). I would imagine that this would be what PDA children looked like then, or if they were forced in and "were naughty" they would end up in special schools aimed at behaviour management.

There were certainly also people who would now get an autism diagnosis actually in the classroom unrecognised though (as one of them was me!).

Not any that would make a difference. You clearly disagree with me, so I shall bow out.

I think you are reading something into my question that I have not intended?

I am interested to understand more about what education and SEN looked like in the past. I am not suggesting that children with autism/PDA didn’t exist (if that is what you think I am saying?) as I hope I made clear in my opening post, I am trying to understand why I don’t remember any. Perhaps my experience is unusual and other people can remember lots of children like this. Perhaps neuro diverse children coped better with the school system as it was back then. Or perhaps they did not go to mainstream schools? I am simply being curious.

You seem to have a strong views and I’m interested in hearing your experiences, but only if you want to share them of course.

Istr also experiencing some experiments with different ways to learn in the Time Before TAs, e.g.: our school had a weird/half-arsed 'special needs meets gifted and talented' fusion programme based on the 'mentorship' teaching model (where you teach the older/brighter kids and then they teach the next set down) which involved someone extracting the brightest couple of kids in each class and the three or four who were most behind and providing (adult-refereed) sessions where they all did an activity together so the smart ones could explain it to the others. That was generally awkward and awful for everyone involved, however, so I can see why it seems to have been left in the 20th century.

Really surprised by some of these responses! I can think of loads of children at my primary who I think would be diagnosed if they were at school today. But back then they were just labelled as “naughty” or “disruptive”.