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

[MaryMaryVeryContrary]

It really seems like we have a looming societal crisis in terms of child development and therefore the quality of the public in 10-20 years time. Experienced teachers across the board seem to be reporting an overwhelming increase in delayed, aggressive and disruptive children. I’m extremely worried about how this will impact society when they become adults - it seems (as a guess) at least a tenth of children will be incapable of work of any kind, and many more will need copious amounts of support to live any kind of responsible life.

AIBU to think we need an urgent public inquiry into this and what is going on? It seems to be the elephant in the room and anybody who tries to discuss it is shouted down.

I’m sure some of it is due to cuts in services but surely that can’t account for it all - it’s very sudden and extremely alarming.

Why the shitty reply? She clearly says she's giving her particular experience and she doesn't extrapolate to the whole world. It'd be a crap discussion if nobody could contribute their experiences.

Why is it unpopular? I agree with you. Even in households that are not struggling financially both parents are probably still working to maintain that. There are ridiculous expectations placed on parents and their children to be doing certain things and projecting a certain image which is hard to maintain. Lots of adults are stressed or anxious due to this and children are perceptive sponges.

I don’t think human beings are capable of living happily in the environment we have created. We are all being pulled in too many directions constantly, causing mental health deterioration. A token well-being day at work does not even begin to scratch the surface. This all trickles down to children.

I think it’s a combination of what seem like pretty obvious issues.

1. lack of intervention, screening etc means issues aren’t identified and no more treated until much later. We don’t see HV’s, doctors etc routinely anymore. Same is true for mental health.
2. Similarly a lack of resources in school. I’m not sure why we’re so surprised about the decline in behaviour in school when we readily accept there’s less staff and higher ratios. Even good kids are more likely to act up. It’s a self perpetuating issue.
3. pressure on parents.
4. better survival rates for infants and fertility treatment meaning children who wouldn’t have survived, survive with issues.

I often wonder about the state of our diet and the effects that has. Over production in the fields of crops grown quickly and harvested to get the next crop in. Combined with very over processed food. The levels of Folic acid and other B vitamin deficiencies as well as vitamin D deficiency are very high throughout the population.

I also think the phone usage is a problem particularly the ability to just look everything up. No need for critical thinking or a trial and error method. etc

I completely agree with the second half of this. The expectations are through the roof in every aspect of life - you need to think about a career, not just a job, your home should look a certain way, you should aspire to a certain lifestyle, etc. That’s before children and education even come into the mix.

I think screens, modern parenting, parental age, healthcare inequalities, UPFs and a whole host of other factors are contributing - including increased awareness. Two parents working doesn’t help - though I think a lot of the time when mothers stayed at home, they would have done chores when I was a kid in the 1980s.

Overall, I think the modern environment in schools makes it more difficult for some ND children to cope who likely would have managed OK in primaries in the 1980s. There is definitely something about expectations.

YANBU. I'm amazed at how so many parents are so keen to keep their heads in the sand.

Why is it so sneered at to acknowledge that the huge amount of time spent on screens, by parents and kids, is having an impact on child development?

I've seen the current exposure of kids and young people to violent pornography described as a crazy, uncontrolled experiment that no one agreed to. But it continues. Children have no way to cope with the extreme footage they've seen, often on a friend's phone at/after school. That has to be a factor in MH.

Covid and lockdown can be added to the mix. Cohorts of kids missed normal social experiences at critical times and it had an impact.

Thorough research needs to be done into the reasons for the significant rise in MH problems and ASD diagnosis in young people.
It's too much of an increase just to be due to better diagnosis.
As a society we need to know why this is happening, our young people deserve better

And about time - good parenting takes time and can’t be squeezed into a free 5 minutes here and there, especially not with stuff like toilet training.

I work in retail, the behaviour of the general public has definitely delined. I get sworn at daily. Have been physically assaulted. Very few people use please and thank you. I often get people just wave their phone in my face and say where can I find this. I constantly get interrupted when serving someone as though their need is more important than than the person I'm serving. It's as though I'm not treated as human. Oh and witness lots of toddlers in pushchairs with propped up phones. It's very depressing.

And what about the parents? You can't lay all the blame at the door of the government and schools. Children only go to school for a very small percentage of their week. Parents always think someone else is to blame for the way their Children turn out.

I agree with most of what's already been written above re screens etc.

But what I've not seen is the Soham effect.

After that awful murder parents stopped letting their DCs out to play unsupervised. It was the norm until then. I remember going to the swimming pool with friends/ not adults from age 10.

Are there any 10 year olds now who go swimming/cinema/sports centre with friends and no adults?

I have 2 children all of who arrived at school needing help. Two are diagnosed with autism and the third with dyslexia. All 3 have been diagnosed with ADD. I agree that a public inquiry would be helpful because there is a problem with how children are being raised.

Being in the U.S. and having family living in the UK I’m able to see how the UK has followed US policies but implemented them differently and not applied the same funding. Another big huge problem is family court and the way children are divided between parents with little regard to what is best for the children. My experience has been that by 11, there are more children with separated parents than those with parents still together.

My experience as a parent is that their father is undiagnosed with autism and it’s greatly affected the children because he isn’t able to parent effectively. Now I’m divorced, I’m not able through the family court system in the U.S. to protect my children. Ideally I would have the children at my home every night and he would take the children during the day. It would be similar if I was in the UK. The current arrangement of week on week off means every other week they are struggling to follow class, school rules and they become disregulated. They come to me Monday evening, it takes me until Thursday to get them back. Schools refuse to get involved in custody cases, understandably so, but the courts are also very biased towards the non primary parent and there is much work to do on recognizing emotional abuse. I think most of the issues my children have would be resolved if the emotional abuse wasn’t an issue. Alas, never going to happen. I do question the ADD diagnosis of my children because it mimics the symptoms of trauma. The emotional abuse they saw and were subjected to by their father was so bad I didn’t want leave the marriage and there are times when I question if I should have waited until the children were a bit older.

As it is my eldest is 12 turning 13 shortly. My home is slow, steady, highly structured and child focused. Bedtime is at 7pm 7 nights a week with lights out at 7:30-8pm. We are up and out by 7:30am mid week and 7am at weekends (cycling or running the local trail to get Starbucks). Daddy is focused on his girlfriend. They go to her home every weekend so my children are seeing their father be with another woman overnight, there is a lot less structure, a lot of yelling and bedtime is as late as 10pm. He does some good things with them but I’m not thrilled my son, who at 11 has just learned how to ride a bike thanks to my sustained efforts, was allowed by his father to get on a motorbike yesterday. My son fell off after he drove into a bush and really hurt himself. My lawyers advice was to teach my son to not get on the motorbike. Hmmm ok. WTF are we doing people?!? This father should have supervised visitation and work towards day release with the children. Overnights should never happen. No wonder my son has struggled so much at school this year.

Call me old fashioned but my children know zero about my private life. They don’t know if I have a boyfriend. I’ve had two boyfriends which they have not been introduced to or known existed. Now I’m married to parenting my children. They really need me and I’m fortunate I’m able to prioritize them. Its a shame their fathers rights supersede the children’s. They deserve so much more.

Agree OP, nrtft, bookmarking to come back to later!

Huge surges in aggression and violence towards NHS staff, teachers (not just from DC but from parents) , retail staff, Police, public transport staff (including airlines).

I don't think that when this happens, some of the social media responses of "maybe they're ND, traumatised, have MH difficulties", the armchair diagnoses and use of clinical speech are particularly helpful; and are possibly contributing to the increase.

There's the five to twelve study which is going on right now op

I think it’s been acknowledged that along with better diagnosis there has been a true rise. I think the symptom net has widened so anxiety, autism, PTSD, depression, OCD all overlap and it’s now very hard to separate out what is what. But equally there has been a rise in ASD that would not have flown under the radar at a ‘more relaxed school’ 30 years ago. Like I said growing up I didn’t know any children who were non verbal ASD, now I know 5. Did any of you know children with non verbal ASD when you were growing up? How many now?

This is all so true

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.

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 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.

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.

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

@BertieBotts I’ve seen you post that report a lot but what it doesn’t do is take into account the level of need. It’s all very well saying ‘X in 10 children back then had SEN, and that’s the same as now’, but without taking in to account the extent of the disability or need then it’s worthless. Like I said virtually every childcare professional (even those working when that report was commissioned) are saying the same thing.

Many of the children now simply wouldn’t have flown under the radar in a different environment. These are children with no speech, uncontrollable anger issues, not toilet trained at 5 or 6.

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.