10 year olds more likely to be on disability benefits than 50 year olds

[AgeingMillennial]

AIBU to think this is absolutely baffling? And at some point we really have to investigate why so many young children are non verbal, have severe emotional regulation problems etc?

You need to soak them first or your body can’t digest them

pain in the backside chia seeds!

But all of those health benefits (from cleaner air, less smoking, less alcohol etc) will also be benefitting 50 year olds and their health.

50 year olds is an odd age to pick because it implies there is something very odd about less 50 year olds being on disability as if 50 is an incredibly advanced/frail age. It isn't. A reasonable expectation would be that, barring an accident or life long ill health, one should still be in good health at 50. Particularly given that work place accidents have gone down in the last half century. Even life-style health conditions (diabetes type 2, issues caused by obesity or smoking, drinking) can affect you at 50 but tend to get worse over time. So an overweight, chain smoking 50 year old man is likely still working and just unhealthy but in 10 years time he'll be in trouble.

So when you take out disability through accident (reduced) and lifestyle (not necessarily hitting 50 year olds in the numbers it does 60 year olds) you are left with hereditary conditions. Most of which make themselves known early on.

I do think there are issues with the rise in child mental illness health. But the assumption that of course more 50 year olds should be unwell than 7 year olds is a strange one to start with. If they were comparing 7 year olds to 70 year olds they would have a point.

I’m suspicious about the impact of microplastics

Porridge with seeds would land my complex child in the hospital.

You're the one insisting that your experience of ADHD is the same for everyone.

I also notice your didn't post a single link to back up your claims that diet doesn't effect ADHD symptoms. Something many experts disagree with https://www.adhdcentre.co.uk/what-is-the-relationship-between-adhd-and-nutrition-how-diet-impacts-your-childs-behaviour-and-focus/

I don't know why you want to think that lifestyle has zero effect on ADHD when it clearly has an effect on many other health issues, including things like cancer.

Clearly we will simply have to disagree, since neither will be convincing the other of anything.

Yes on paper we should have far fewer disabled children than 40 years ago.

Better and more vaccines
Better pregnancy care, scans and treatments
Better care in case of accidents
More awareness around healthy pregnancies, smoking and drinking etc

In the 70s there were no scans, every child with Downs or spina bifida etc would be born - every single one. No terminations for medical reasons.

Yet somehow we have far more disabled children now.

@AgeingMillennial
Do we have (as a percentage) far more disabled children now? Or is there just better records kept, more help available and applied for?

Are families applying for help because they know the chances of employment when their children become school leavers is low? Previous times non-academic children could leave school early and find manual work.

Or were they just not recorded because there wasn’t the help, financial or medical?

Is it that disability has increased or society cannot absorb some of the disabilities as easily with more office jobs or even WFH?

Why should we have fewer disabled children now? Children are surviving things which in the 70s they would have died with

The level of women given steroid injections in pregnancy for pre term birth is a direct link for adhd (I was counselled for this risk in 3 pregnancies) and as I said earlier, I think microplastics are a big factor too.

Mine too. Perhaps that’s the intention. After all the benefits bill would reduce if some die as a result.

My DC would be dead if it were the 70s.

But your article and the point of your earlier comments wasn't that there were more disabled children than 40 years ago...
It was amazement that there were more disabled children (10 year olds) than disabled middle aged people (50 year olds)

The first is true and finding out why is important. But the actual statistics used by the Telegraph were about something different and actually very misleading.

In the 70s, my child wouldn't have survived. He only survived due to modern medical care and he's disabled due to the fact that he survived in the first place.

I don’t think that’s true. There are disabilities that are treatable now that would have killed children forty years ago. And not all parents who are positively scanned for disability choose to abort.

Because they are sufficiently disabled to qualify and have the evidence to support it ?

This is anecdotal but all four special schools two primary and two secondary in my LA have doubled in capacity over the past 10/15 due to the growing needs of children
These are chiildren with complex disabillities who would never have bern able to mainstream.

Non academic children are NOT the same as disabled children
Famllies are NOT going to get help because their child struggles academically and gets low GCSE grades

If you’re talking about disability benefits there is no no correlation with diagnosis - you don’t need a diagnosis to claim benefit.

And the onus is always on the claimant to report, at the time it happens, any improvement in their condition that would put their continuing eligibility for benefit in doubt.

Also,.as horrific as it sounds (and is), where children were born severely disabled in the past they wouldn't always be given available treatment to help them survive. The talk about abortions being more available than in the past ignores the fact that post birth unwell children weren't always helped to live. As awful as that is. It was also much more common for mothers to be encouraged to give up their very disabled children at birth and "not to bond" and usually the facilities put on to care for them weren't great and had quite high mortality rates. That's aside from the very real and fantastic medical advances we have also seen. But just because abortion wasn't a thing doesn't mean people were "pro-life" (and actually a lot of "pro-lifeers" in the US don't seem fussed about providing medical care and support to help poorly children once they are born.

Are you also aware that child DLA also requires the parent to clearly distinguish the level of need due to disability from that required for a ‘normal’ (for want of a better word) child ? All children require care and supervision. And where child DLA is concerned all the medical evidence in the world is for nought unless it can demonstrate that the child meets eligibility on the basis of disability and not just because they are a child.

Yes I understand that

But today some ADHD can be medicalised to increase concentration for example, making academia more accessible to some that in previous times wouldn’t have been possible.

And with the increase of special school spaces, percentage wise has it increased with local population?

Many factors influence numbers and statistics - which is why deeper delves are needed not just reactions from a line graph. Kids get taught this in school (youngster revising for geography mock) to look at the weaknesses in the collective data.

Yep. Agree. I’m in my sixties and have a congenital disability. My own mum told me years later that she and my dad were advised it would be better to let me die as I would always be a ‘burden’ - not only that, but that the clinical decision had already been taken and they had to fight for it to be reversed. It’s unthinkable now.

I was a disability outreach worker and over the years, just from chatting generally to disabled people of a similar age to myself, it’s quite horrifying how many of them recounted similar experiences. It was a totally different world with significantly less checks and balances in place than there are now.

I'm wondering if closer supervision of children by adults these days has increased the survival of children with conditions like ADHD. 1 of mine has constant supervision at school to keep him safe. Back in the 1950's he would probably have been given some bread and jam and sent outside to play goodness knows where. He is my youngest so he might have had an older sibling keeping an eye out but nothing like the constant adult supervision he gets now.

Because those things often just stop dying.

We now keep people alive who wouldn’t have lived but they will then often has some sort of disability.

There is talks as well about microplastics in the water and women’s contraception actually affecting even fish in the sea.

But basically babies are born that never would have been or would have never survive birth a few days / weeks after are but often with disabilities.

Children are surviving accidents they wouldn’t have before but live with the consequences.

Adults much like children surviving more accidents but consequences.

We have more dementia and stuff because we are living longer so now people who would have already been long dead are now living with that as well at the other end. Care homes full of adults who really are long gone their sell by dates kept just alive not comfy or happy or living just breathing basically.

Medicine keeps us alive but doesn’t keep us healthy and able.