Did some ND children starve before chicken nuggets were invented?

[BusWankers]

I'm not being horrible, genuinely curious.

You read on here how a child who has autism or some other issue, will only eat safe foods. Usually a lot of things like chicken nuggets, a particular brand of cheese and onion crisps, Nutella, supermarket pizzas (UPF mostly)

Do we think children in the 1920s just went hungry? Or perhaps they were forced to eat foods they didn't like. After all you do hear stories,of adults even now being made to sit at the table and choke down food etc.

I have a family member in his 60’s
who would be diagnosed now. He has only ever eaten chicken and potatoes. Won’t touch anything else. Has never eaten a vegetable or a piece of fruit. My own father has very disordered eating (healthy but rigid and obsessive). I suspect he is on the spectrum. He’s 86. He’s often spoken about difficulties with childhood food and had an aversion to any sort of meat. My own son is AuDhD and has a very limited diet (won’t eat chicken nuggets!) and my late diagnosed daughter (approaching 27) has disordered eating that I now realise is ARFID. So it appears people would have adapted their safe foods in relation to what was available. It’s misleading to suggest it’s all about chicken nuggets or UPF.

The “pander” word makes my teeth itch. ND parent here.

My autistic son has always eaten most things so l have been fortunate. Some things, though, are no-go areas. I remember when my brother started university in the mid-eighties, there was a fellow student who we called The Special K kid, because this was what he predominantly ate. Hardly anything was known about ASD then but, looking back, this young man was almost certainly on the spectrum. I know of another autistic person, born in 1940, who has lived most of his life in various institutions. He has more dislikes than likes when it comes to food, which must have been incredibly difficult in wartime and the post-war period. He remembers his mother getting very frustrated with him over this issue. Understandably, given the extra difficult circumstances of the time.

I ate a very limited diet as a child. My parents and the school tried to get me to eat different meals but it never worked - in the end I was allowed to take my safe foods to school and not have school meals. Basically I was phobic about food and terrified of unfamiliar tastes and textures.

I did largely spontaneously grow out of it as I got older, and now eat a wide range of foods. But I still get anxious when going for meals at other people's houses in case they present me with food I absolutely cannot eat: eggs, mayonnaise, etc.

I have one with autism - same age. I actually think the fact that food issues improve when they are teens is partially to do with growth spurts and the body being desperate for food. Although like you, I did try very hard to get a variety of food into my dc for years.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/boy-7-died-undiagnosed-eating-31872750.amp

Yep very uneducated.

Not sure I believe this. My mum was a child of the 40's. Rationing was a thing for years and chicken was a big deal, as in, once a year, at Christmas.

As a SEN teacher in a very diverse area, I have observed that autistic children with sensory differences around food will tend to eat the bland/beige foods from whatever their cultures common foods are, eg plain rice/noodles/chicken/chips/bread. Ive always found this interesting to observe. So no i don't think they'd have starved, they'd probably just have different, commonly available safe foods.

In 1920 162.5 children out of 1000 would die before the age of 5.
Malnutrition was normal. As were childhood diseases and a lack of access to doctors (who you had to pay for and thus were beyond the means of many). If you had certain conditions - one of them being severe enough autism - you'd still be institutionalised.

In the interwar period, antibiotics became available which was a huge change.

Ironically rationing for 14 years during WWII dramatically reduced malnutrition as everyone had a basic level of food.

In 1950 33 children out of 1000 would die before the age of 5. They now had access to free health care as well as effectively having an understood minimum level of nutrition.

Now the child mortality rate is 4 per 1000.

That means 29 children survive who wouldn't previously in the 1950s.

So yes, these are children who would have died in the past, and it would have been seen as normal and accepted. You can see the changes in attitude and access to health care, alongside development of medicine in these numbers.

The mortality rate in 1800 was 329 per 1000 - and thats the really scary number because this rate would have been typical of life for hundreds of years before revolutions in farming and medicine.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041714/united-kingdom-all-time-child-mortality-rate/

We don't see child mortality as 'normal' now. We see it as something that is entirely avoidable.

Human beings are generally programmed to survive. Extreme mental health issues can (and do) cause people to divert from this - anorexia, suicide etc but on the whole, human brains are there to make decisions to keep you alive. This may be impaired by sensory issues, but when push comes to shove, the majority of people choose life.
It’s an inbuilt thing that most of us can’t control very well. It’s why we feel fear.
An incident occurred when I was a small child where I choked and then refused to eat for 2 weeks. Literally nothing went in my mouth apart from water. My mother was in bits.
But my Grandmother left some food out on the side cut up into small pieces and simply said “There’s something there if you want it”
A few hours later she found a nibble out of one. My hunger and innate drive to survive had kicked in.
I nearly gave my mother a breakdown to get there though 😂

Most, I repeat MOST, people will hit that survival mode at some point. SEN people might take longer but they are still human with an inbuilt survival mode.

True, but they can make themselves very very ill in the meantime and why would you let your child do that to prove a point?

Once your BMI gets below a certain point you don't feel hungry any more. So this may also be applying in children with ARFID.

Yes and they still do. The theory they'll eat if they're hungry enough does not apply for many autistic children with issues with food. ARFID is a diagnosis many autistic people have and it is now being recognized that many people, particularly girls and women who are seen to have eating disorders may potentially be undiagnosed autistic.

That's sick. Don't know how teachers or catering staff could look on in good conscience at that situation. Awful.

If you read as many old children’s books and dusty novels as I did growing up, you will see that parents of that era were obsessed with their children’s diets and eating, and their own diets and in particular their ‘digestion’. All sorts of foods were considered ‘too rich’, unsuitable at various ages, times of day, or inappropriate for women. Reading between the lines, you can see what we today would call allergies, IBD, ARFID, eating disorders etc etc. And the idea that children reared literally on bread and dripping, tuberculosis-infected or watered-down milk and a very restricted food supply were ‘healthier’ is hilarious.

Oh I fully agree. That’s kind of the point I’m getting at. The child probably would eventually eat something else, but the emotional trauma of getting to that point (and the physical issues such as weight loss, weakness etc) it’s absolutely no wonder parents don’t follow it through. A parent wants to keep their child alive and healthy, so it goes against their whole remit to ‘let’ a child sit and not eat for so many weeks until they finally give in through starvation.

It’s extremely difficult and I can see how people get into this situation. Parents want what is best for their children.

I'm autistic, albeit not with sensory issues around food itself (but plenty unfortunately around food prep, where/who is cooking, having my own cutlery etc - but I hide it well and you wouldn't know, even DH doesn't).

The thing about safe foods is often reliability/consistency - unlike a raspberry or a homemade cottage pie or whatever, a packet of crisps or the famous nuggets are consistent. The hundredth will taste identical to the first. So my hunch, per PP, is that there would just be another version of safe foods.

It happens

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/health/teenager-died-cramlington-hospital-in-32102132.amp

For between 25 to 35% of women recieving treatment for anorexia the root cause of the illness is their autism.

Bread existed.

So no.

My df ate a very plain diet, and was hugely resistant to modern culinary trends. He regarded curry with the deepest suspicion. His diet was very repetitive but basically nutritious. He was so particular about his potatoes and would only eat certain varieties.

One of his aunts had died, I think around the age of 11, and the story was that she was too weak to survive the illness because she was such a poor eater. My gm was her younger dsis and deeply affected by it. She was hugely complimentary to my dm when my dsis was born about her “fat” baby, though dm was being a bit overweight herself.

I was another poor eater though, so she eventually understood where gm was coming from! Even now my appetite can shut down if there’s something about a food that grosses me out and I could miss a couple of meals before I’d feel any desire to eat again. If I’m under a lot of stress, that happens very easily, and it can be better to stick to a safe food for a while so that I’m actually eating something regularly. As an adult I can rationally understand that I need to eat, and that the reason I’m feeling light headed and dizzy is because of hunger. But I still have a hard time getting calories in.

There's evidence linking premature birth with SEN. Babies born prematurely simply didn't survive & the infant mortality rate was far, far higher.

Higher risk pregnancies never made it either.

It's highly likely that the children we have today with SEN would have been the still born & infant mortality statistics from 100 years ago.

Well given that even today there is a strong link between anorexia and ND, I imagine many of them did indeed die. And they continue to do so today, it's not that easy to "fix".

Interestingly, chicken nuggets is one food that I never liked, even as a child. The texture to me was too ‘mushy’ for chicken, compared to a piece of chicken itself.

@Pricelessadvice, what an ignorant statement.

You have also confused priceless with worthless.