I don’t get it either.
I mean I do - when I read threads where parents have a 5 year old who can’t speak, has no danger awareness and trashes the house, I have full empathy and think they absolutely deserve benefits to fix the damage and pursue private speech therapy.
But in other cases - completely verbal children with what you’d call a few fairly mild difficulties like not liking certain clothes - well, you have to buy clothes for children anyway, so I don’t see the difference. Same with food.
There’s definitely a scale and I feel PIP etc is no longer meeting its original purpose, it just seems to be a ‘nice to have’ for people with regular if unusual expenses. Pretty much everyone I know has an unusual expense - very few people don’t have a mild health condition, or a food intolerance, or a need for something most people don’t have. If they all claimed benefits for that.. well, they literally couldn’t as they wouldn’t be able to make the payments.
I also find it unusual that so many families claim DLA for more than one child. I would’ve thought that an unusual occurrence but it seems very common now.