To think perhaps my son isn’t autistic but instead modern society is too challenging for him to cope with.

[SpinningTops]

My son is 7 and on the long waiting list for an autism assessment.

Sometimes I wonder whether he would cope absolutely fine if he was an 80s or 90s child. Maybe it’s rose tinted glasses but modern life seems so chaotic and jam packed, so much to learn at school etc.

He’s in a small class at school and seeing the number of children struggling, so many with ‘special jobs’ to just get them into the classroom, makes me think something is wrong with the system rather than all these children being neurodiverse. And this is an absolutely wonderful school which outwardly he says he loves.

It’s just something I’ve been thinking more and more about recently …

Hard to disagree with @Pricelessadvice.

My children’s school is certainly far more sensitive to and set up for different needs than when I was in education, I’m not sure it’s fair to blame schools, which are in my experience an incredibly caring place, but think more about how parenting and the wider world has changed.

Yes, of course. The rush to diagnose people has many benefits though:
1 pharmaceutical intervention & profits
2 individualisation of problems & therapy culture
3 the system can become ever more hierarchical and serve those at the top - the already extrovert and well off

Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

We have moved away from people being seen as assets, to being seen as a burden - every other thread on here is how some old/disabled/'needy' person is a terrible drain on society. If they don't 'add value' to your life ditch 'em.

Teachers used to be trained that everyone is valuable, can learn and contribute, and has a unique set of skills and interests.

Surely at his age you have plenty of control over what his life is like? We purposefully have a slow calm life because that’s the kind of people we are and so our son has the same life.

I do agree about schools in general and that’s why we have ours in private school. The class sizes, noise level, and general chaos in the local school are too much.

@SpinningTops I don't know enough about how your DS struggles to comment on whether he's autistic or not. I think that modern society shines a light on autistic children who would have hidden in the shadows years ago.

There were always going to be the children who were clearly autistic or had ADHD. My DM talks about her school days and describes the kid who was just tied to a chair each day because they couldn't get him to sit still. The kid who was sent to the corner of the room to face the wall because they couldn't understand what to do, etc.

I was an 80s child. I am autistic and have ADHD, only diagnosed in the last year. The signs from childhood were:

• having a lot to say but nobody could understand my speech
• investigated for learning disability because of my speech but was found to have an IQ double my chronological age.
• didn't 'fit' in the classroom
• bullied right from the beginning of my school days.
• school refusal as a young child
• did 'jobs for the teacher' to avoid play time
• precocious reader - I was used as a 'TA' to listen to other children read when it was reading practice time.
• had to be stopped from doing maths so other kids could catch up because I was too far ahead in the text book.
• I read Reader's Digest 'You and Your Rights' for fun when I was 9 or 10. It has 753 pages and I would read it from cover to cover, then start again.
• I wasn't allowed to do times tables tests because I got 100% all the time, so I had to do maths investigations instead.
• in secondary school I'd get into trouble because I knew more than the teachers and we both knew it, but I didn't know that I wasn't meant to show it.

I could go on. My point is that I slipped under the radar. I was seen as unpopular, awkward, quirky.

Now, the pressure is so high on children from the very beginning.

Even so, if your DS has been flagged at this age, go with it. DD2 is now 18. She wasn't flagged by school staff until 9 (I had been raising concerns since 18 months). Diagnosed at 11. Now needing specialist intervention.

Unfortunately not everyone has the means to put their child into a private school. But yes your right about the home life, my kids purposely have a slow & calm home life and it does wonders.

Ageee. Modern life and especially schooling now is like a daily ADOS test if you have ASD.

Define highly functional

Yes of course I don’t mean about private school. If we didn’t have the means to choose private school our general outlook on life is still the same. We don’t do lots of clubs, we spend a lot of time in nature, we love slow unstructured days, we don’t dash about. I know a few parents whose young children seem to be constantly stressed and having meltdowns and all they do is run them around to endless clubs and activities.

I have a neuro-diverse child and his main issue in life is school. He's safe and happy at home so I've had similar thoughts, that he wouldn't need a diagnosis if it wasn't needed to help him get through school. However he would still be autistic/adhd it's just that it's less of a problem at home.
I went to primary school in the 90's and believe I have undiagnosed ADHD (my son takes after me) and believe me it was not easier. Nobody thought to assess me or help me, my teachers just screamed in my face and told my parents I was unteachable because I couldn't pay attention.

My dh best friend was left in the back of a class to do colouring from the age of six and no attention paid. They had classes of kids that were deemed thick because they couldnt spell or do maths more then likely with a learning disability but basically just left to do baby work in second level

I think life in general is harder and more complicated for all including ND people now. A couple of generations ago people all generally ate the same bland food and ate at home rather than eating out. People tended to stay nearer to where they grew up and got a ‘job for life’ doing something fairly repetitive.

I’m not sure why so many are struggling at school. I remember it being noisy and crowded when I went and there wasn’t anyone with noticeably bad attendance. If it’s a small class maybe he is autistic OP? Nothing wrong with that.

That’s what I thought - so bored of these threads.

I have been thinking a lot about autism since a lot of diagnosis in my family. As far as I understand it autism is a neurotype, as in a type of brain structure. Neither better nor worse than other types of brain type, and not a disability in itself. However the different circumstances and situations that we put those brains into can become disabling depending on how well it can cope.
Therefore the same person can be more or less ‘disabled’ depending on their situation.
I believe that we will discover more brain types as time goes on. And that what is called ‘autism’ will actually turn out to be several different things that just share common signs and symptoms.

This is it, it’s just life in general. So if we go out, our supermarket might have 30-50 children’s magazines to get him overwhelmed, any activity we try to go to you have to go through a gift shop to get tickets which usually results in a meltdown. Everything feels bright and trying to get you to buy things which he finds really difficult.

My DD showed signs of ADHD/ASD years before she had an ipad or used one of our phones, nor did she use any form of playstation etc.

Give her a book or any form of cosplay/story development and she can focus for ages.

I am not saying electronics are innocent, there is an issue with the development of short attention span in all of us.

But when I look at DH and some of my family members - ADHD/ASD is definitely inherited.

My niece (NT) is year 2 and at the end of the school week she is knackered. The lessons seem to be intense and she's involved in all sorts of club. I left primary less than 20 years ago and I never remember school being that demanding, nor was there much homework other than the standard spelling, timetables and odd worksheet. I also did a sport to a county level and it wasn't until about y6 when you had to provide big commitment.

Op have a look at Pete Wharmby’s books.
He’s autistic, a former teacher, he has written about how the modern open plan classroom can be much harder for autistic kids to cope with than the more structured Victorian schools that were built so as to minimise distraction.

It’s a tricky one - The school system has changed significantly since I was a child, and I was one of those quiet, weird kids that did ok at school, but I still think I would have benefitted from an earlier diagnosis. It would have helped me understand myself better and may well have helped me avoid significant mental health issues in my teens. All three of my children have received diagnoses, and school has worked well for one, been a little tricker for the next, and almost impossible for the third. Whether this is because of their presentation, ability to mask or the school system changes itself is a really hard puzzle to unpick. However, it’s interesting to note that those experiences run from the eldest to youngest, which makes me think there’s some connection that suggests school is getting more difficult for ND children…….. I’d be interested to hear more opinions on this! Thanks OP for starting this thread - I don’t feel it’s a stealth grumble, it could spark a really interesting discussion!!!

The modern classroom is dominated by the "smart" whiteboard and powerpoints (ugh). The screen is cluttered with needless headers and footers and other spurious information, and sometimes even needless animations and sound effects. For anyone who would otherwise have "mild" sensory irritation, it's relentlessly jarring. In the old days there was an occasional image shown on the overhead projector and otherwise just the teacher talking and handing out books and paper.

I'm a teacher so I have control over my own classroom and rarely turn the projector on, and if I do, it's usually to project a single image or (very rarely) a short video clip. Not relentless interminable screen time.

Life decades ago was challenging in different ways.

However, many of today’s triggers weren’t an issue.

Life was consistent- people didn’t travel as far, food was somewhat monotonous. Clothes were uncomfortable mind- stiffer and itchy 😅. I liked hand me downs that someone else had knocked the stuffing out of!

There wasn’t continuous noise and lights everywhere you went.

It was a lower demand environment in many ways.

Same story as many here, my autistic daughter is perfectly able to cope with pretty much everything except school. She is in Year 9 now and there is literally never a normal week where she just has to go to lessons, muddle through and come home. Every single week, and actually most days, there's an assessment, or a non-uniform day, or people from industry coming in to run workshops. Mostly, it is the assessments which hit her hard. They have to revise, and for most subjects they have to turn in their revision in a certain format as "evidence" that they've revised. "I thought doing well in the test would BE the evidence that I'd revised!" is a regular refrain in our house.

Add this to the fact that there are 1500 pupils in a school built for 900, the toilets are constantly locked, and lunchtime is only 30 minutes as a behaviour management tool, and you can understand the struggle.

He copes really well at school, once in. We’ve had a bit of refusal to go in in previous years but his current teacher is amazing.
It all falls apart outside of school, I think he masks.

OP, I agree. I think I'm probably neuro diverse bit never diagnosed. I lived abroad till I was 8, zero technology except a radio. Then back here it was a bit of children's TV in the afternoon, lots of outside play. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to cope and I'm 52. I think smartphones was a huge one for me.

I am autistic and always think I would have been a lot happier living in the 60s. Nowadays there are sounds, music, screens and flashing lights everywhere. Parenting roles were more divided where as nowadays both parents are expected to do a bit of everything. I definitely feel I would have benefited from being able to concentrate on either work or family life, combining both can be overwhelming. We also have the expectation that someone is constantly available and reachable now. Switching off is a lot more difficult now.

I definitely think it was a lot easier for autistic people to cope a few decades ago and maybe that is why diagnosis was rare because people just didn't need the level of support they need now.

It’s so sad and unnecessary that small children are watching PowerPoints. As soon as PowerPoint comes on my brain switches off with anticipatory boredom so goodness knows what it does to kids!