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Autism/ADHD

(177 Posts)
mrsgreenfingers56 Tue 02-Dec-25 15:02:14

I am struggling to understand why so many children are being diagnosed with Autism and ADHD.

Do you think this has always existed but we didn't really understand what it was and when I think back some children were called very naughty or backward and they had these two conditions.

Someone said to me poor parenting and the gentle parenting of today, the diets the parents have had, X Boy use. tablet and 'phone use.

Everyone's child I come across has these problems and really puzzling me as to why?

Comments please.

M0nica Sun 07-Dec-25 18:16:02

*winterwhite. For many families it is genetic and can be seen handed down the generations. Often not necessarily the same neural diversity, but neural diversity in its widest diversity.

My father was probably autistic, as was his mother. I have dyspraxia and ADHD, as does my son but DGS has ADHD and disautonomia,

There are many reasons why more children are being diagnosed with neural diversity. Everything is both nature and nurture. In my family there is a tendency to be short sighted and the intensity of the sight loss seems to reflect those of us who were the most assiduous readers as children. DS and myself were intensive readers, anything we could get our hands on. My sisters and DD who read much less, are shortsighted, but not as much.

I think that for those of my generation where life was much more structured and there were frameworks of daily life that we all fell in with and these quieten the mind and environment, while nowadays home life seems to be much less structured - and that is an observation not a criticism - plus the intensive use of screens with their jumping around primary colours that seem to occupy children's attention for many hours a day from a very young age aggravate the problems of children who already have concentration problems.

Whether modern diet with its high proportion of UPFs feeds into it, I do not know but feel that it should do.