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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]op - I guess my point is that I do wonder if we are slightly pathologizing 'normal' - or rather my point is more nuanced. I come from a different country and I've noticed that [b]Americans have super high expectations of behavior and self regulation from kids. Where I come from, at school, kids are way more 'rambunctious' when younger - playground scuffles, lots of crying from 5-8, lots of mean words, lots of staring out of the window when should be buckling down.  And teachers deal with it in different ways depending on the teacher and the school. [/b]But WAY fewer diagnoses. Now you could 100% argue that is a bad thing and I think largely that is correct. But I do think we are reaching a crunch point. Either we change our entire understanding of neurology to multiple different neurotypes instead of just 'normal' or 'autism' or 'adhd' (basically the only choices for kids) and start setting ALL humans up to understand their unique learning and communication style, OR we change the parameters for diagnoses and separate them from health insurance criteria (which is an insane yardstick to be using for a lifelong diagnosis). [/quote]

I agree with you that our modern parenting and school expectations are a huge problem.  It didn't used to be this way.  We/Americans used to know that children are children and not mini-adults but we seem to have forgotten.  Is it the increase in small families with 1 or 2 children or childless/child free adults and the disappearance of large families with lots of children? So there's a lack of knowledge and experience of children?[/quote]

I do think that the increase in child free adults is part of it (I don't think smaller families is a factor because often behavior expectations are higher or stricter in large families because otherwise it's chaos, whereas in a family with 1 or 2 kids there is more capacity for kids to display childish behavior).

But I also think there's been a shift in expectations and behavior from parents. People expect to be able to do more adult things with their kids. People take kids out to eat, to the movies, to concerts and parties, and traveling way more than they did a generation ago. There are more kids in places like restaurants and airports and hotels than there used to be. But there are also lots of child free adults in these places. It creates an untenable situation where kids pretty much have to behave like adults because they are in a place where that is the expectation.

But this does not explain why these expectations have extended to schools, one of the few places in our society that are meant to be designed for children. I have noticed a trend of fewer and fewer teachers having kids of their own -- could that be a factor? Or maybe it's everything teachers are now expected to do with the trends towards mainstreaming kids with more severe SNs and the lack of support from administrators and parents? It's one thing that people expect kids in a restaurant to be quiet and sit still, but now kindergarten teachers have high expectations for this. Kindergarten! And at the same time kindergarten and even preschool have become more academic.

It just feels like a perfect storm with a lot of decisions made by adults that are putting more and more kids in the position of losing spaces in childhood where they can be wild and energetic and silly and just... kids.[/quote]

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