"Where were all the kids with ADHD 40 years ago then?"

[colditz]

Help me to answer my dad, who has delivered a fantastically ignorant diatribe (mainly along the lines of Ds1 "can't possibly be autistic, he's always smiling at me. He's a happy boy Colditz, he's not Autistic") but he has raised a point I can't answer.

Where were the children with ADHD 40 years ago?

Where were the children with High Functioning Autism?

According to him, and many people in their 50s, there WAS no ADHD, or CERTAINLY there wasn't in their school .... so ... where were they?

OMG -reading the OP I suddenly realised that at my comprehensive school they had a unit called the Slow Learners Unit .

How un-PC was that?

MillyR - borstals were still around when I was at school in the 1970s.

And there are a lot of people in their 40s and 50s now who are thought to have ASD - including Gordon Brown and Bill Gates.

As some people have said, they were the engineers

Not sure about 40 years ago, but 25 years ago they were sent to special school. DH has ADHD, and was sent there and drugged heavily so he was in a much calmer state.

Yes Lady Biscuit, but it is a prison, it is totally different to a residential school.

Residential schools were for children with emotional and behavioural issues.

Borstals were for young people who had been convicted of a criminal offence.

I think you should clarify that ADHD and Autism are two entirely different conditions, for those who don't know, as your OP is ambiguous. And that High-Functioning and Low-Functioning Autism are so different as to practically be different conditions.

When I started teaching it was still called ESN
(Educationally Sub-Normal) and they got Remedial Reading.

Remember this poem?
I ? am ? in ? the ? slow
read ? ers ? group ? my ? broth
er ? is ? in ? the ? foot
ball ? team ? my ? sister
is ? a ? server ? my ? little ? broth ? er ? was
a ? wise ? man ? in ? the
infants ? christ ? mas ? play
I ? am ? in ? the ? slow
read ? ers ? group ? that ? is
all ? I ? am ? in ? I
hate ? it.

OMG -reading the OP I suddenly realised that at my comprehensive school they had a unit called the Slow Learners Unit shock.
How un-PC was that?

You've just reminded me that our comp called that unit the "remedials" and we called the kids the "remos"

Take your point MillyR - thought you meant that they'd been abolished by then

at the back of the class flicking things at people, getting walloped with lengths of wood and learning what failures they were

at your dad

COuldn't agre more. My son (now 21 and about to get his Maths degree) has ADHD and utterly HATED coursework - which definitely is a "girly" thing - my daughter got on fine with it!! Excelled at maths, can barely write his name legibly".

And my parents thought he was just naughty and badly brought up. Oh and ADHD in their world still does not exist.

then there were the "Approved schools" half way between a Special school & Borstal...

Well, I'm 30.

And I was trying to explain to my dad that the 'special school' in our town when I was a kid didn't just take the children who were utterly crippled with neurological problems. They took the kids who were' just off-centre' enough to not cope in mainstream.

I have a friend who went there. She's a very nice girl who made me a birthday cake and raises her children quietly just like everyone else. She can't really work, she can't concentrate long enough, she has ADHD - but until she was 9 I was at school with her and she was known to other mothers as "that horrible child who thumps" which is appalling. She doesn't lack brains, and she regrets that she never got a 'proper' education but she certainly isn't noticebly different.

I think these kids, the ones who are like she was, are now in mainstream school. They are the ones like Ds1, and a couple of other kids at his school. 25 years ago, he's have been moved at about his age to a special school. depending on how he copes, he might be moving when he's older anyway, but we'll see.

We are convinced my db had and still has ADHD he was always in trouble at school failed school and was 'the class clown' but was brilliant at manual work IE gardening and woodwork, even things he does now make us wonder, he winds his dd's up terribly and when they get hyper he flies off the handle at them.he's 43 it has been known about for about 100 years but the British have refused to acknowledge it until recently.

yes, betsy and Milly - Approved schools is what I was thinking of.

well, i did wonder when MIL dismantled our fridge poetry and started arranging the words by type.....advers/ verbs/nouns etc...(i was very annoyed as well) alhough i partly attributed this to Too Much MN which gets you seeing SN everywhere...

but then as others have said, mild cases would just rub along under the 'bit odd' bracket, or 'short attention span' ..profound autism would be recognised but handled differently.

Actually topsy - I think people who don't know should go and inform themselves rather than relying on me to explain something in minute detail, but I'm feeling a little antsy today

Not really about high functioning autism but my cousin was severely autistic in the 60s, to the extent he was locked away and had his teeth taken out to stop him biting (cannot remember if it was biting others or himself).

Maltesers - that was offensive.

my db(30) was a really naughty child, my mum struggled to cope with him and school had nothing but problems!

today he suffers with ocd and is not the most socible person in the world

mu mum always says if he was a child of today he would of been diagnosed with adhd or something!