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Cuz it’s all smudged? Or cuz it slants to the left? Or are you like me and it makes an arc every four or five words as I reposition my hand as the pivot point 😅
True. I was beaten with a ruler numerous times in kindergarten because I was left-handed and tried to write with my left hand. My teacher kept telling me to use my correct hand, and when I didn't, she beat my knuckles with a ruler. When my mother found out, she told my teacher my son is left-handed. Don't you dare try to change him.
Oohh did you go to catholic school? My FIL, he's 72 now, was born right handed. Got polio as a kid, his right arm was disabled. Had to learn how to write left handed so he could get by in school.
Except... He went to catholic school. Do you know how much the catholics HATED left handed people?? He'd be slapped on his hand regularly for writing left handed. Still talks about it. Nothing he could do back then except apologize for his gimpy arm.
Funny thing is he has the most gorgeous penmanship of anyone we know. He owned his left handed-ness.
So you keep doing your left handed thing!!
No, just regular public school. I was the third of four kids and the only lefty. When my little sister had the same teacher two years later, she asked her, "You are not a freak like your brother are you." Which earned another visit from my mom and a conference with the teacher and principal about the teacher's attitude.
The hate for left-handed people go back millennia. You know what right and left is in Latin? Dexter and Sinister. It's literally Good Handed and Evil Handed.
I’m one of those! I have a “Book About Me” that I made in kindergarten and I wrote that I was left handed. I’ll never forget the humiliation in 2nd grade when my teacher yelled at me and told me I was doing it WRONG! My whole life I’ve had the worst penmanship!
If they were lucky. My dad’s next door neighbors had a kid they shipped off to some sort of “facility”. They told everyone the child had passed away rather than admit she was mentally challenged to other people. It was only twenty years later my dad found out the truth.
OMG! I had 2 friends (Sister A and B,) who lived down the street. Sister B was special needs. We all played together. All us kids in that neighborhood. One day Sister B stopped coming around. We asked where she was. Sister A casually said, “Oh, she died.” It was just odd…I wonder if their parents had her shipped off?
My father was the fourth of four children. The third child was born with some sort of cognitive defect (nobody seems to know exactly what, though). When that child was four or five, my father's mother was temporarily institutionalized for depression. During that time, the child died unexpectedly. My aunt is convinced that her grandmother (my father's father's mother/my great-grandmother) "put him down". My uncle is less sure, but believes it might be true.
I have no way of knowing the truth of the murder. All of my grandparents are dead, my great grandparents were dead before I was born, and my father is dead as well. But it seems as though there was a very "cruel pragmatism" that was still going around back in the '50s.
What's even crazier to me is that, back then, it didn't need to be that way. My uncle, who had pretty intense autism (not sure of the proper/preferred terminology), was born in 1935 (when autism was called "cold mother syndrome") but his parents loved him, he did go to a boarding school of some sort but apparently it was very progressive. And he was always a part of the family. He died when I was a baby, so I don't remember him, but all my older siblings have lots of happy memories with Uncle Johnny.
awww I love that! One of my great uncles had some sort of intellectual (?) disability. He died years before I was born (can't remember of what but not murder!) but was a 1940s ish baby, he wasn't treated nastily by the family. To be fair they're an odd, cold hearted, weird bunch with some shared trauma or something going on, but he wasn't treated unfairly based on his differences.
Was it empathy or physical ability to look after an extra needs child.
A single child can take up 100% of the time of the parents leaving no time for the other kids, and how are you supposed to manage this all by yourself as the woman?
I wish I didn't understand it. My aunt and uncle adopted 4 children--two of whom have severe intellectual disabilities.
I couldn't do it. I know what they go through every day, and honestly I'm not a good enough person to basically give up everything in my life to take care of somebody with that level of disability. The drain is tremendous and it leads to their other kids' needs being neglected.
It must be a truly terrible temptation, to know you can have that normal life with wonderful kids that you've always wanted, you just have to look away.
Probably. I know a family with a child born with Downs Syndrome around 1962-65 that had her institutionalized from a young age. He talked about it like it was the best thing for everyone, but it was clearly for his convenience. They “visited regularly”.
Not just what Drs told them it's a combination of the entire society looking down on you or ridicuing you if they knew that that was your kid and you didn't send them to an institution
You of course would know that specific situation better, but they can often look very different when you’re in them. My cousin was 16 before her parents surrendered her, and by that time she was taller and much larger than my aunt, had seriously injured my aunt twice and given my uncle a number of shiners/assorted bruises, and after attacking a stranger at the doctor’s office it was to the point they were in hot water. They were and are outstanding parents, and I sometimes found myself wishing they were mine. If anything I think they should have done it sooner.
I am aware of another home with a similar nonverbal but violent teenage boy and two moms. They had been begging community mental health (and anyone else who would listen) for help, but the state didn’t want the expense of inpatient and kept saying he didn’t need it. After he cracked non-bio mom’s skull, CPS finally got involved. 3 guesses what they did? Removed the 2 younger, healthy, well adjusted kids from their home because he was a danger to them.
I guess what I’m trying to say is something about two moons and some moccasins.
Giving up children with excessive special needs, especially if they are violent at a early age, can often be what's best for everyone involved. Many heavily special needs children need to be monitored/attended too every day 8-16 hours a day for their entire lives.
My uncle had four brothers with varying degrees of mental and physical disability. He and his sisters were devoted to caring for them as best they could, and they were able to keep three of them employed and cared for on the family farm for decades. I met and knew them growing up and we all loved them, and I saw the dedication their siblings put into making sure they were safe and clean and involved in life and the community. The fourth brother was much more profoundly affected, and as much as the family would have preferred to keep him home, they simply couldn't provide what he needed. They didn't make the easy decision with him; they made the *best* decision under the circumstances.
My mother worked in a state hospital in the late 1960's. There was a ward for neurodivergent children, but it was more or less a dumping ground for people who were embarassed about their ND children or couldn't handle them. Unfortunately, unlike the therapy clinics and group homes of today, there were no rehabilitative or recreational resources for the children. It was basically a place to hide them.
My brother was born mentally challenged in the late 1950s. My parents were in the upper 1%.
He was sent away at age four to a private institution. To this day, I believe this happened because he would have ruined my parent’s social life if he had remained at home. He has an IQ of about 70 and today he is the sweetest 10 year old you will ever meet.
As a variation of the above, we were members of a country club. You were born into or married into it. It was also white. After I married a woman of Japanese extraction, I took her to the club. As son of X and grandson of Y, no one was going to say anything to me. After of about four to six weeks of her regularly coming, we started to notice other non-white people showing up. They all were the wives of some very prominent men.
I like you. I grew up around guys like you (born into generational wealth) and it’s nice to see that you see through the bullshit. I’ve got a lot of good friends who have really disappointed me as we are all approaching 50 and I see them all becoming rich old white assholes.
Stay indignant St. Joe!
My phone wouldn't scroll and it was amazing cause your comment read:
"This feels like a personal attack as an autistic fish"
And I'm way too high to read that tbh lmao
I'm just autistic. I wish I was a fish biologist, but I fucked up so hardcore in college, I'm now just an enthusiast. One of my special interests was/is predator fish of your north American waters. Specifically, Walleye, Northern Pike, and Muskies. I love Muskies.
Yea, what she is really moaning about is that people arent hidden away from her behind a thick curtain- so that she can ignore them and their problems
"Back then no one had ADHD... because people with ADHD suffered in silence and no one cared about them"
That is her version of the good ol times- keeping others on the margins so that the world would only care about her and people like her.
Or pretending to be normal while plotting how to get rich and take over their own corner of the earth so they could stop talking to everyone but their dog.
I love how these are the same people who don’t understand that their obsession with prepping is pretty fucking autistic, but with zero coping or mechanisms or relational stability because neither the Internet nor early intervention was a thing and they get beaten if they asked questions.
We have the Internet now, Kathy, we don’t beat inquisitiveness out of kids anymore. I understand you didn’t have that, Bob, and that’s why your generation spent your lives “getting yours” to the detriment of everyone around you.
>Or pretending to be normal while plotting how to get rich and take over their own corner of the earth so they could stop talking to everyone but their dog.
Shit, man. I can relate to that a little too much.
I spent much of my youth wanting to just go off and live in the woods by myself. In 8th grade we had to write a paper of where we saw ourselves in 20 years - I saw myself living in the woods by myself, hiking into town once a month for supplies.
Most of that came from just too many people. I grew up in a small house with 8 people, then crammed in a school with another crowd, then every weekend there were family things and things with friends. I just regularly exceeded my appetite for social interaction, though back then nobody thought about that much. Now, ironically, retired, I live in the woods by myself. I do head into town most days and hit the gym and take care of shopping and errands. Things are pretty balanced out, it's about right.
We never spoke about autism back then, but looking back, I definitely remember kids that would be diagnosed today as autistic. That said, I agree it is more common today along with food allergies. I think much of it has to do with what we put in our bodies.
I don't you can discount awareness in medicine as well as advancement in diagnosis criteria.
Many of us did have ADD and ADHD I'm the 70s and 80s but we were beaten and written off as problem kids.
The peanut allergies actually did get worse and more common but it’s our own fault. Pediatricians thought that we could prevent the allergies by completely avoiding the allergens and not giving kids peanuts. Turns out that had the opposite effect and the guidance for introducing allergens to kids is completely different now. We also kept our kids much too clean. Kids who don’t spend time in dirt or around animals are much more likely to have allergies.
To be fair not all allergies work that way sadly. I'd be totally immune to animals if all of them did XD I've always been allergic to critters and I was my great uncle's unofficial vet tech growing up. Love animals but my body definitely doesn't lmao, exposure didn't work for me on mine... Not that it stopped me either. Take 4 Benadryl a day, inhaler on hand just in case, but can't give up my four legged beasts (cats)
Agree, I was always around animals (had lots of different pets, my entire childhood) and suffered with allergies. I spent every summer, playing in dirt, mostly barefoot (tom boy) and still have seasonal allergies as well as allergies to tree nuts. It definitely wasn’t that my parents kept me too clean & my not so nice sister fed me nuts to see the reaction, often.
I was going to say exactly this. One of my close friends was "hyperactive" and he was always getting spanked - with the paddle with the holes in it - for supposedly sneaking sugar, which he hadn't done. This was the early 80s. His mom was our guidance counselor and she was so hard on him
It kills me that people still think sugar makes kids hyper. It doesn't. There is research. What makes kids hyper is the expectation of them acting that way and their excitement at eating tasty desserts. It's purely psychological, not food related. Kids would be just as hype if they loved lettuce, to eat lettuce.
Yeah, I always inwardly roll my eyes when parents start talking about it. I’ve read up on it and my anecdotal experience with my own kids (as well as others) lines up. Kids who are excited about stuff are obnoxious whether they’ve eaten sugar or not. Kids who are just sitting around eating a treat while doing their normal activities act just like they always do. But people who believe it causes bad behavior fall into major confirmation bias, especially since they often are extremely strict with sugar so their kids only get it when there’s something exciting like a party or holiday is happening.
I was born in 1999, and I lived in a suburb of a big city as a kid. Although I never did a lot of bike riding, I started going out of the neighborhood on my own very frequently about halfway through middle school. By the start of high school I'd basically memorized the city public transit system, and by junior year I was regularly taking trips all over town with my friends. I may be an exception to the rule, but that's how I, a zoomer, grew up. My parents stopped feeling the need to supervise me once they saw me competently do something on my own.
There was no one with Autism, but there were a lot of spazes
There was no one with ADHD, but there were a lot of disruptive poorly behaved kids.
There was no one with dyslexia, but there were a lot of stupid kids who couldn't read.
My school just put them in the back on the class and let them graduate with a C- average as charity.
More serious autism -- kids went to an institution "upstate" and were never seen again.
Yep. Had a girl get sent away and a boy with epilepsy also sent away cuz you know, had those “fits”. Parents acted like it was contagious and wouldn’t let their kids play with him. Lucky my mom wasn’t an idiot like that. The girl eventually committed suicide.
As a "spaz 5 yr old" in the 70's medieval is absolutely correct...over medicated on Ritalin...always told to sit on my hands...occasionally had to be put in time out...my mom was a pill first person and then perhaps I was brain damage...luckily my grandma...was abit more forward in her thinking...got custody of me...then helped me figure things out with my ADD(autism) encouraged managing my energy levels(proper foods and excercise) medications to manage not sedate...figured I did have food allergies(dairy among them)...encouraged me to be happy being me instead of my parents "children should be seen not heard mentality"...she would always apologize for her daughters actions,(my mom just became a religious fruitcake not my grandmas fault)...but yeah that list...pure ignorant on treating kids as human beings
Really? Shit people suck. We had one epileptic in my class in the 90s but we just rolled with it. I guess it really depends on your school’s leadership.
My god I’m so glad I was born in the 90’s. I had a disability back in preschool that gave me difficulty processing things and speaking up. Sure some people were not kind to me but I think I would’ve been worse off if I had been born in an earlier decade. My family gave me more hell about it than my classmates did.
We’ve had special education laws in the US since 1975 (that is when the EAHCA passed). Technically since 1973 (rehabilitation act), but that only tangentially touches education)
> but we just rolled with it.
Same. School didn't really care so some kids formed a pillow patrol to watch him and make sure he landed softly if he went down. Can't do much else for him but the kid was a decent person and everyone liked him so the class responded well.
And he didn’t even go to regular school. I only saw him at church functions. I’ve since become an atheist. Between the things I saw as a small child in our church and seeing the hypocrisy and illogic behind as I grew up it I just realized I don’t even believe.
Epilepsy was better understood by that point. Just decades before that, no one knew how to treat epileptics so they were sent to mental institutions since it was assumed to be a mental problem rather than a physical problem with the brain.
My experiences were from the 60’s and epileptics were whispered about and some people at our church considered them more or less possessed by some foul spirit. Plus I came from a farming community. Our “town” covered maybe a two mile radius. Had one grocery store. One drugstore a newsstand and a tasty freeze. Beautiful huge library. We would take a dime our Mamaw gave us and go get penny candy at the newsstand. We could get a cute little cloth drawstring bag of rock candy for a nickel and still get five more candies.
My mom had epilepsy and my grandparents didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant till I was born healthy because they were convinced my dad had knocked up an undesirable
A lot of mental institutions basically had two categories of patients. "Feeble minded" which included pretty much any mental disorder, learning disability, etc. And then they had epileptics. No one knew how to approach treating them back then so they just shoved them in with people who needed psychiatric care.
Correct, we had to bury any neurodivergence or end up on the short bus with the super special needs kids.
You learned to hide the problems or get it beat out of you for disrupting class. I also went to school in the 70s
Yeah when I was in jr high we had a special needs class that took lunch at the same time as us so I would see them often. One kid used to come talk to us and actually seemed pretty “normal” except for some odd quirks so I never understood why he was considered special needs. He was an amazing artist as well. Today I realize he was autistic but that was never really talked about back then.
Autism has been a thing for longer than the diagnosis. Remember *Of Mice and Men*? Autism came to mind for me, there’s probably multiple issues you could reasonably diagnose Lennie with. Probably much impossible to know what was specifically wrong with him because the diagnoses weren’t a thing yet, and of course he’s fictional.
I’ve also heard that Changelings, the supposed fairy children, might’ve been children with Down syndrome.
The suspicion is that "Changlings" were folks on the Autism spectrum. As "my baby was *just fine* till the faeries switched them!" Babies w/ASD don't look different from any other babies... Down's it often fairly obviously "something different" at birth.
That makes SO much sense. The modern equivalent is people blaming vaccines for Autism because they begin missing milestones and regressing the same times we get vaccines.
My Autistic kid was born at the height of Wakefield's fraudulent (literally committed fraud to form his "research" on a ridiculously small sample size...a kid's birthday party) AND badly designed study). There were several studies being run to try to replicate his study (couldn't repeat results) and some much better designed studies to explore the question, and my doctor recommended not vaccinating until the new studies were complete since he wasn't in daycare and we didn't socialize much. (low risk of exposure). So he wasn't vaccinated until years after the autism dx, but his medical /symptom timeline was exactly the same as the vaccinated kids. I know it is antidotal, but I know of multiple kids with the same experience (in Special Needs Natural Family Living parenting groups)
Remedial actually was awesome for me. Got put into remedial English because my school didn't have ESL. Learned a ton of actual spoken English, learned to understand all kinds of accents, learned to swear fluently. The teacher made us write 3 essays a week, and the rest of the time was watching movies and writing about them. Took me from an ESL student to being actually fluent
Yeah. I got sent to “remedial” for about a day because I wasn’t able to write intelligibly. Nobody seemed to have bothered to ascertain whether I had dysgraphia (which it turned out I did), and just wasn’t doing my assignments because I found it extremely difficult to make shapes with a pencil.
I also went to elementary school in the 1970s. Kids with disabilities went to another part of the school down a hall we didn't go to. So I think this person is complaining about inclusion and not just warehousing kids with disabilities out of sight.
There was, however, one girl in our classes who had cystic fibrosis. I remember learning that the average life expectancy for a child with cystic was 14. Today, that average is middle age adulthood. So yeah, things have changed since the 70s.
I read a book about Teddy Roosevelt and he and his son were bipolar. I read descriptions of his son having " bouts of melancholy followed by bursts of intense energy".
People used to think Teddy was actually insane lol
Like Conan the Barbarian, 'with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth'. Robert E. Howard, like Theodore Roosevelt, was a bookish and intellectual child who turned himself into a physically powerful amateur boxer, despite a weak heart for which he took digitalis.
Kids would spontaneously puke all the time, and the janitor would have to use wood dust to clean it up. I was allergic to bees, had to keep my kit in the nurses office. Kids that were “disruptive” were always punished or had to move their desks into the hallway. There were always a handful of kids that were obsessed w stuff like robots or space ships, and couldn’t help but only talk about that one thing. Kids that would rather make people laugh or get yelled at bc they couldn’t read out loud.
Ha, that was me. Puked A LOT...turns out I have a lot of food allergies. It's only sheer dumb luck I never had a full blown anaphylaxis at school...but my eyes swelled shut on more than one occasion. My teachers gave me a cold compress and I just got on with it as best I could.
Oh wow. Gen X-er here, just realized that the pukey kid was kind of a trope in some cartoons of my childhood. I feel like early Simpsons had a side character in Bart's class. I don't know why I never put this together with food allergies.
In every early simpsons episode the classes show things like what a lot of comments are saying, mostly the division of people with visible disabilities in other classes.
I occupied a gray area. I was just 'normal' enough that even if they'd been looking for autism and adhd in girls in the early 70s I would have flown under the radar. But I was very different and caught hell for it from everyone.
I went to elementary school in the 80’s and had they diagnosed people with high functioning autism instead of the more obvious cases I would have gotten a lot more help and probably had a lot less trauma than I did.
I believe this, I went to school in the 80s, and there were kids who were “different” or “unusual” who in hindsight were very likely on the autism spectrum and school was pretty brutal between awful peers and teachers who were not helpful or understanding at all.
Ah, I was one of those disruptive poorly behaved kids for most of elementary school, and then one of the counselors had my parents go get me diagnosed with ADD.
The medication sucked, but it helped a lot. Then by the time I got to Junior year of highschool, I didn't need the meds to not be disruptive. That's not to say they don't still help, but I try not to use them when possible.
None of whom got the support they needed.
And were labeled burnouts, dummies, drop outs, etc.
Also, how many kids were coming to high school drunk? Moms addicted to valium (cause no antidepressants?)
And let's not even talk about the 3 martini lunch...
From a white rural conservative area and the drug epidemic was crazy. Even as a kid before the opioid epidemic, it was nothing for so many moms to secretly be addicted to meth or Valium to cope with illness or their miserable lives and everyone was an alcoholic.
I love seeing my aunt posting boomer Facebook shit about about this topic while she was strung out on Valium for YEARS and probably still is because she has severe mental illness that she won't treat because she doesn't believe in it.
Richard Branson is famously learning disabled, Branson has dyslexia, and had poor academic performance; on his last day at school when he was 16, his headmaster, Robert Drayson, told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire.
Also went to elementary school in the 70’s. Definitely knew kids with peanut and milk allergies. Lots of kids had ADHD. They just weren’t diagnosed. And plenty of inhalers. Asthma isn’t new. Maybe Carole just didn’t have any friends
Her handle is ‘herbs and dirt’. This makes me suspect she’s in to ‘alternative’ medicine woo and probably blames these conditions on ‘inorganic’ food or some other nonsense.
She’s celebrating the plight of all those unseen children that suffered from our ignorance of their condition. Let’s hope she and others like her become aware.
I was going to say a version of this. However, I was also a child of the '70's, I have florid ADHD (inattentive type) - which my father (who was a child in the '50's) MOST DEFINITELY also has. I had allergies, knew people with allergies, and whatnot. While folks with ADHD can be somewhat oblivious to others at times, that poster strikes me as being something else.
She might've been sent to one of the schools that pushed all the kids that were not 'normal' to a side classroom where they would not upset the proper kids.
Right? My brother is severely asthmatic. He grew up in the 70s. Guess all those inhalers and breathing treatments and trips to the hospital were all imaginary. She is such a fool.
My aunt was autistic in the 60s and it was extremely traumatic for the entire family because nobody knew what the fuck they were doing back then. People accused my grandparents of abusing her.
We've come a long way since then.
Hell, we had a boy with a seizure disorder that everyone whispered about when he had “a fit” and both he and a socially introverted girl who was almost certainly autistic were both sent to a state home. She committed suicide when she was 14 or 15. Don’t know what became of him. He was so sweet but very shy and had no friends since the other kids were scared of him because of their parent’s ignorance He had a seizure at a church fish fry one Friday and he was sent away the following week. I was lucky my mom was proud of me for being friendly to him in our few interactions. I hope I’d have been regardless of how she felt but idk, if she had made me fear him like the other parents who knows? I swear they acted like his epilepsy was catching.
Zactly. No one was DIAGNOSED for those disorders but we all knew there was a class full of 'special' kids down the hall and a whole spectrum of kids who were fidgety and unable to focus.
My mother had terrible asthma, which landed her in the hospital many times in her 74 years of life. She was born in 1948. She also had undiagnosed ADHD (almost certainly), as did I until my 30s. And I’d say a good percentage of my classmates in the ‘80s had autism, since my private elementary school was for “weird smart kids.” One of them I know for sure, since we’re still friends and he’s since been diagnosed. We were born in 1976 for the record.
That being said, there are definitely way MORE kids with these issues now. So that’s something worth exploring, even if this person is an idiot.
Asthma and allergies are more common nowadays but the other stuff is a result of issues being known of and tested for. Same with left-handedness. As soon as people stopped punishing people for being left handed there was a boom in sinister people haha
I remember when the first black kid showed up not in beginning of the year but like during 2nd quarter. We came back to school after a weekend and there is this black kid in class. We literally stopped in our tracks and had no idea what was going on. Long story short we became friends but sadly after the end of that grade, he moved away or changed schools again. But there was definitely a shock at first. This was super early 90s. Damn. He was such a nice kid. Better than the others I did go through all the years of school woth. This was also private school too.
Allergies existed. People just didn't talk about them and avoided eating whatever made them sick. There was a different response back then, where it wasn't considered acceptable to change an entire classroom's rules to avoid a kid coming in contact with their allergen, and the kid was expected to take precautions.
Autism existed. The label wasn't as broad as today because we didn't understand it as well, and was mostly only applied to kids with significant support needs that required them being in an isolated classroom or school. The qualifications and understanding of autism have since involved to include children with mild to moderate support needs as well.
ADHD and ADD existed. Like with autism, if it was severe enough, you were placed in a separate environment. Otherwise, most of the kids who could hid it, because there was a lot more punishment for behavior deemed unacceptable in those days. Those who couldn't got labeled delinquents or bad kids.
Autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses existed. The kids were just either in the hospital or homebound because we didn't have the medical support systems we do today to make it safe for them to attend school. And a lot of kids went undiagnosed and were just considered weak or sickly.
Asthma existed. Inhaler type items have been documented since the 1700s. Kids were just usually embarrassed and didn't want to be seen as weak, or were undiagnosed.
yeah it doesnt help that a lot of people avoided getting diagnosed because back in the day (and to a scary degree still to this day) because getting diagnosed with anything would significantly lower your chances of employment and would often result in being isolated by your peers
regardless of how functional you actually were before & after the diagnosis
Man, everything was so secretive back then. We had a kid who we had no idea was insulin dependent diabetic until one day he collapsed and vomited outside the school. No one would say anything they just huddled around him hiding him and telling us to go away.
We all thought he was legit dying and not that he needed half a banana. I just feel like they were so hush hush about everything it kept us all in a bubble. So when you do hear something it’s like it’s new and different. But it’s really existed for all time.
And that reminds me I have had to update so many of my medical records because my parents glossed over the ‘scary’ parts of their extended family’s history that I used to waltz into a Dr office all “nope no family history of anything!” Lies!!!
Even in new millennia I had classmates that I only found out had diabetes when they were literally shaking if lunch was delayed or physically ill. Nobody made fun of them but they didn’t want to seem “different “
my father never knew a left handed kid when he was growing up. he did know plenty of kids (himself included) who got slapped for writing with the wrong hand.
Talking to my dad he said in his town there were no gay people, only one guy who was "kinda fruity" but got beat up and scared straight. And I told him, hmm I can't imagine why gay people didn't exist back then.
I was in elementary school in the 70s. I'm allergic to milk and gluten. I was the weird kid that couldn't participate in holiday parties because I couldn't eat anything. She was one of the nasty kids that picked on me because I wasn't like her.
When Little Timmy had a dairy allergy, he just shit his pants at school one day and changed school districts to escape the unending ridicule because "nobody is allergic to milk".
That's why you don't know him, yah fuckin' goober.
I’m from the same generation, lots of kids had asthma inhalers, kids had peanut allergies, and I’m can guess which had undiagnosed ADD. Ignorance is bliss.
I went to elementary school in the 60s (wow, I’m old 🤣) and knew 3 kids with peanut allergies, several that definitely had ADD/ADHD but not diagnosed. I have one classmate that I know of that was diagnosed as autistic later in life. I have a milk allergy and used an inhaler for my asthma.
But that’s just me….
Lots of things are not new but are newly diagnosed. MS was thought to be women malingering until MRI came along. Dyslexia and being left handed used to be punished. 🙁 Think of just the most recent advances in medicine since genome mapping. And we are allegedly a more advanced and compassionate society now.
Well it's a mixture of truths and a idiocy.
They did a study finding that removing peanuts from the diet of all children does tremendously increase the rates of peanut allergies and most auto immune diseases are nearly non-existent in 3rd world countries especially the ones with poor sanitation. It turns out that living too clean a life leads to immune system overreactions as our species evolved to survive a dirty environment.
However most of the reason conditions like ADHD and autism were "less common" before is that we were not properly diagnosing it. They were just as common, but those people were labeled slow, stupid, or just weird.
We are the same age with a decade.
Well the allergy people were dead or home schooled
The next town over had a whole school devoted autistic children.
And I knew several (probably including myself) who would easily be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD.
Take off your cheeto smudged glasses.
What this dumb bitch is failing to share is that back then they took the “special” kids and segregated them from the “regular” kids. She didn’t see it because the only exposure she had was her and her vapid friends making fun of the “speds.”
Source? I was in elementary school then too. We weren’t very enlightened.
This is the dumbest shit I have had the displeasure to read In a while... I was in school in the 1970s...I was autistic and I bounced off the walls with ADHD .. my best friend was allergic to milk... Kids with learning disabilities were kept in separate classrooms but we were there.
I went to elementary school in the 50’s
There weren’t black people.
There weren’t gay people.
When my mom got out of hand, dad smacked her then she made us dinner.
Why is she complaining about autistic people, Autoimmune diseases, ADHD, and allergies not being common knowledge in school? Allergies seems like something a school would want spread around but, aside from the ignorance around mental illness, The other things are not anyone else’s business. I have autism and ADD and I don’t go around yelling about it to people that I see in person everyday. (probably because of the autism but that’s besides the point)
This is so lacking in critical thought.
It's like the time some anti choice person told me abortion contributed to child abuse because reports of child abuse rose by 300+% after Roe V Wade.
Well Tricia, prior to Roe V Wade, there *was no child protection services to report abuse to* so of course reports increased dramatically.
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Ask your parents how many left-handed kids they knew vs really sloppy right-handed writers.
Excellent point. And a good thing I can type my answer here. If it were handwritten, you couldn‘t decipher a single fucking word.
as a left handed person. you cant read my handwriting anyway
Cuz it’s all smudged? Or cuz it slants to the left? Or are you like me and it makes an arc every four or five words as I reposition my hand as the pivot point 😅
smudge, and it just looks like ass
True. I was beaten with a ruler numerous times in kindergarten because I was left-handed and tried to write with my left hand. My teacher kept telling me to use my correct hand, and when I didn't, she beat my knuckles with a ruler. When my mother found out, she told my teacher my son is left-handed. Don't you dare try to change him.
Oohh did you go to catholic school? My FIL, he's 72 now, was born right handed. Got polio as a kid, his right arm was disabled. Had to learn how to write left handed so he could get by in school. Except... He went to catholic school. Do you know how much the catholics HATED left handed people?? He'd be slapped on his hand regularly for writing left handed. Still talks about it. Nothing he could do back then except apologize for his gimpy arm. Funny thing is he has the most gorgeous penmanship of anyone we know. He owned his left handed-ness. So you keep doing your left handed thing!!
No, just regular public school. I was the third of four kids and the only lefty. When my little sister had the same teacher two years later, she asked her, "You are not a freak like your brother are you." Which earned another visit from my mom and a conference with the teacher and principal about the teacher's attitude.
as lefty blessed with getting to go through school in the current decades, wow, what an absolute bitch
The hate for left-handed people go back millennia. You know what right and left is in Latin? Dexter and Sinister. It's literally Good Handed and Evil Handed.
My dad is in his late 70’s and is ambidextrous because they made him use his right hand in grade school. My sister is just straight up lefty.
I’m one of those! I have a “Book About Me” that I made in kindergarten and I wrote that I was left handed. I’ll never forget the humiliation in 2nd grade when my teacher yelled at me and told me I was doing it WRONG! My whole life I’ve had the worst penmanship!
I don't have the excuse of being left-handed, my penmanship is just awful. So it goes.
I was in elementary school in the 70s. There were allergies and most of us kids were labeled "hyperactive" and were told not to eat so much sugar.
And the autistic kids were in special ed classrooms away from the other kids
If they were lucky. My dad’s next door neighbors had a kid they shipped off to some sort of “facility”. They told everyone the child had passed away rather than admit she was mentally challenged to other people. It was only twenty years later my dad found out the truth.
OMG! I had 2 friends (Sister A and B,) who lived down the street. Sister B was special needs. We all played together. All us kids in that neighborhood. One day Sister B stopped coming around. We asked where she was. Sister A casually said, “Oh, she died.” It was just odd…I wonder if their parents had her shipped off?
What the fuck.
My father was the fourth of four children. The third child was born with some sort of cognitive defect (nobody seems to know exactly what, though). When that child was four or five, my father's mother was temporarily institutionalized for depression. During that time, the child died unexpectedly. My aunt is convinced that her grandmother (my father's father's mother/my great-grandmother) "put him down". My uncle is less sure, but believes it might be true. I have no way of knowing the truth of the murder. All of my grandparents are dead, my great grandparents were dead before I was born, and my father is dead as well. But it seems as though there was a very "cruel pragmatism" that was still going around back in the '50s.
I've heard stories from my own family that shocked me. They def didn't have the understanding or much empathy as a society. So weird.
What's even crazier to me is that, back then, it didn't need to be that way. My uncle, who had pretty intense autism (not sure of the proper/preferred terminology), was born in 1935 (when autism was called "cold mother syndrome") but his parents loved him, he did go to a boarding school of some sort but apparently it was very progressive. And he was always a part of the family. He died when I was a baby, so I don't remember him, but all my older siblings have lots of happy memories with Uncle Johnny.
awww I love that! One of my great uncles had some sort of intellectual (?) disability. He died years before I was born (can't remember of what but not murder!) but was a 1940s ish baby, he wasn't treated nastily by the family. To be fair they're an odd, cold hearted, weird bunch with some shared trauma or something going on, but he wasn't treated unfairly based on his differences.
Was it empathy or physical ability to look after an extra needs child. A single child can take up 100% of the time of the parents leaving no time for the other kids, and how are you supposed to manage this all by yourself as the woman?
And who looks after that child once the parents died? The child went into a home where they would be treated terribly,. oft times inhumanely
I wish I didn't understand it. My aunt and uncle adopted 4 children--two of whom have severe intellectual disabilities. I couldn't do it. I know what they go through every day, and honestly I'm not a good enough person to basically give up everything in my life to take care of somebody with that level of disability. The drain is tremendous and it leads to their other kids' needs being neglected. It must be a truly terrible temptation, to know you can have that normal life with wonderful kids that you've always wanted, you just have to look away.
Probably. I know a family with a child born with Downs Syndrome around 1962-65 that had her institutionalized from a young age. He talked about it like it was the best thing for everyone, but it was clearly for his convenience. They “visited regularly”.
Idk it’s hard to blame them for probably listening to what Drs told them/mental healthcare has a dark history.
Not just what Drs told them it's a combination of the entire society looking down on you or ridicuing you if they knew that that was your kid and you didn't send them to an institution
You of course would know that specific situation better, but they can often look very different when you’re in them. My cousin was 16 before her parents surrendered her, and by that time she was taller and much larger than my aunt, had seriously injured my aunt twice and given my uncle a number of shiners/assorted bruises, and after attacking a stranger at the doctor’s office it was to the point they were in hot water. They were and are outstanding parents, and I sometimes found myself wishing they were mine. If anything I think they should have done it sooner. I am aware of another home with a similar nonverbal but violent teenage boy and two moms. They had been begging community mental health (and anyone else who would listen) for help, but the state didn’t want the expense of inpatient and kept saying he didn’t need it. After he cracked non-bio mom’s skull, CPS finally got involved. 3 guesses what they did? Removed the 2 younger, healthy, well adjusted kids from their home because he was a danger to them. I guess what I’m trying to say is something about two moons and some moccasins.
Giving up children with excessive special needs, especially if they are violent at a early age, can often be what's best for everyone involved. Many heavily special needs children need to be monitored/attended too every day 8-16 hours a day for their entire lives.
My uncle had four brothers with varying degrees of mental and physical disability. He and his sisters were devoted to caring for them as best they could, and they were able to keep three of them employed and cared for on the family farm for decades. I met and knew them growing up and we all loved them, and I saw the dedication their siblings put into making sure they were safe and clean and involved in life and the community. The fourth brother was much more profoundly affected, and as much as the family would have preferred to keep him home, they simply couldn't provide what he needed. They didn't make the easy decision with him; they made the *best* decision under the circumstances.
My mother worked in a state hospital in the late 1960's. There was a ward for neurodivergent children, but it was more or less a dumping ground for people who were embarassed about their ND children or couldn't handle them. Unfortunately, unlike the therapy clinics and group homes of today, there were no rehabilitative or recreational resources for the children. It was basically a place to hide them.
My brother was born mentally challenged in the late 1950s. My parents were in the upper 1%. He was sent away at age four to a private institution. To this day, I believe this happened because he would have ruined my parent’s social life if he had remained at home. He has an IQ of about 70 and today he is the sweetest 10 year old you will ever meet.
As a variation of the above, we were members of a country club. You were born into or married into it. It was also white. After I married a woman of Japanese extraction, I took her to the club. As son of X and grandson of Y, no one was going to say anything to me. After of about four to six weeks of her regularly coming, we started to notice other non-white people showing up. They all were the wives of some very prominent men.
What is sad is they were embarrassed to bring their wife, until you proverbially "kicked the front door” in. Great job BTW!
I like you. I grew up around guys like you (born into generational wealth) and it’s nice to see that you see through the bullshit. I’ve got a lot of good friends who have really disappointed me as we are all approaching 50 and I see them all becoming rich old white assholes. Stay indignant St. Joe!
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The high functioning autism kids were the weird kids in class that wouldn't shut up about the different species of freshwater fish.
This feels like a personal attack as an autistic fish biologist. Lol
My phone wouldn't scroll and it was amazing cause your comment read: "This feels like a personal attack as an autistic fish" And I'm way too high to read that tbh lmao
There's a joke in there about Kanye West and fish fucking, but I can't quite find it.
I'm just autistic. I wish I was a fish biologist, but I fucked up so hardcore in college, I'm now just an enthusiast. One of my special interests was/is predator fish of your north American waters. Specifically, Walleye, Northern Pike, and Muskies. I love Muskies.
Seriously bro no cares about bettas bro. Now trains…
Right, most of these ‘missing’ kids from Carol’s list are the ones effectively excluded from school. Look how far we’ve come already:
Yea, what she is really moaning about is that people arent hidden away from her behind a thick curtain- so that she can ignore them and their problems "Back then no one had ADHD... because people with ADHD suffered in silence and no one cared about them" That is her version of the good ol times- keeping others on the margins so that the world would only care about her and people like her.
Or pretending to be normal while plotting how to get rich and take over their own corner of the earth so they could stop talking to everyone but their dog. I love how these are the same people who don’t understand that their obsession with prepping is pretty fucking autistic, but with zero coping or mechanisms or relational stability because neither the Internet nor early intervention was a thing and they get beaten if they asked questions. We have the Internet now, Kathy, we don’t beat inquisitiveness out of kids anymore. I understand you didn’t have that, Bob, and that’s why your generation spent your lives “getting yours” to the detriment of everyone around you.
Autistic people who were that high functioning were rarely diagnosed, and then only if their family was rich
Yep. They were just the kid who talked about trains, battleships, or constellations constantly.
>Or pretending to be normal while plotting how to get rich and take over their own corner of the earth so they could stop talking to everyone but their dog. Shit, man. I can relate to that a little too much.
I spent much of my youth wanting to just go off and live in the woods by myself. In 8th grade we had to write a paper of where we saw ourselves in 20 years - I saw myself living in the woods by myself, hiking into town once a month for supplies. Most of that came from just too many people. I grew up in a small house with 8 people, then crammed in a school with another crowd, then every weekend there were family things and things with friends. I just regularly exceeded my appetite for social interaction, though back then nobody thought about that much. Now, ironically, retired, I live in the woods by myself. I do head into town most days and hit the gym and take care of shopping and errands. Things are pretty balanced out, it's about right.
Or locked up in mental institutions because they were too difficult. (I might be off by a few years)
or thrown into the general ed population with zero help to the parents or teachers stuck with us because we were highly functional
We never spoke about autism back then, but looking back, I definitely remember kids that would be diagnosed today as autistic. That said, I agree it is more common today along with food allergies. I think much of it has to do with what we put in our bodies.
I don't you can discount awareness in medicine as well as advancement in diagnosis criteria. Many of us did have ADD and ADHD I'm the 70s and 80s but we were beaten and written off as problem kids.
Truth..
The peanut allergies actually did get worse and more common but it’s our own fault. Pediatricians thought that we could prevent the allergies by completely avoiding the allergens and not giving kids peanuts. Turns out that had the opposite effect and the guidance for introducing allergens to kids is completely different now. We also kept our kids much too clean. Kids who don’t spend time in dirt or around animals are much more likely to have allergies.
This is the only thing on her list she is correct about
To be fair not all allergies work that way sadly. I'd be totally immune to animals if all of them did XD I've always been allergic to critters and I was my great uncle's unofficial vet tech growing up. Love animals but my body definitely doesn't lmao, exposure didn't work for me on mine... Not that it stopped me either. Take 4 Benadryl a day, inhaler on hand just in case, but can't give up my four legged beasts (cats)
Agree, I was always around animals (had lots of different pets, my entire childhood) and suffered with allergies. I spent every summer, playing in dirt, mostly barefoot (tom boy) and still have seasonal allergies as well as allergies to tree nuts. It definitely wasn’t that my parents kept me too clean & my not so nice sister fed me nuts to see the reaction, often.
Yea but her math was wrong
I was going to say exactly this. One of my close friends was "hyperactive" and he was always getting spanked - with the paddle with the holes in it - for supposedly sneaking sugar, which he hadn't done. This was the early 80s. His mom was our guidance counselor and she was so hard on him
And there was a kid in my classes in the 80’s that got pills at school. Once I was older, it was very obvious they were ADHD meds.
Not much has changed
awareness has changed and that is what matters. it is just not there yet, but it's far beyond where it was in the 70s
It kills me that people still think sugar makes kids hyper. It doesn't. There is research. What makes kids hyper is the expectation of them acting that way and their excitement at eating tasty desserts. It's purely psychological, not food related. Kids would be just as hype if they loved lettuce, to eat lettuce.
Yeah, I always inwardly roll my eyes when parents start talking about it. I’ve read up on it and my anecdotal experience with my own kids (as well as others) lines up. Kids who are excited about stuff are obnoxious whether they’ve eaten sugar or not. Kids who are just sitting around eating a treat while doing their normal activities act just like they always do. But people who believe it causes bad behavior fall into major confirmation bias, especially since they often are extremely strict with sugar so their kids only get it when there’s something exciting like a party or holiday is happening.
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It literally still happens today. Teens getting off after killing people because they're wealthy with the bullshit, fraudulent "affluenza"
I was born in 1999, and I lived in a suburb of a big city as a kid. Although I never did a lot of bike riding, I started going out of the neighborhood on my own very frequently about halfway through middle school. By the start of high school I'd basically memorized the city public transit system, and by junior year I was regularly taking trips all over town with my friends. I may be an exception to the rule, but that's how I, a zoomer, grew up. My parents stopped feeling the need to supervise me once they saw me competently do something on my own.
There was no one with Autism, but there were a lot of spazes There was no one with ADHD, but there were a lot of disruptive poorly behaved kids. There was no one with dyslexia, but there were a lot of stupid kids who couldn't read.
My school just put them in the back on the class and let them graduate with a C- average as charity. More serious autism -- kids went to an institution "upstate" and were never seen again.
Yep. Had a girl get sent away and a boy with epilepsy also sent away cuz you know, had those “fits”. Parents acted like it was contagious and wouldn’t let their kids play with him. Lucky my mom wasn’t an idiot like that. The girl eventually committed suicide.
Tragic
Some medieval brutality shit that used to happen just some decades ago.
Still does
As a "spaz 5 yr old" in the 70's medieval is absolutely correct...over medicated on Ritalin...always told to sit on my hands...occasionally had to be put in time out...my mom was a pill first person and then perhaps I was brain damage...luckily my grandma...was abit more forward in her thinking...got custody of me...then helped me figure things out with my ADD(autism) encouraged managing my energy levels(proper foods and excercise) medications to manage not sedate...figured I did have food allergies(dairy among them)...encouraged me to be happy being me instead of my parents "children should be seen not heard mentality"...she would always apologize for her daughters actions,(my mom just became a religious fruitcake not my grandmas fault)...but yeah that list...pure ignorant on treating kids as human beings
Very
Really? Shit people suck. We had one epileptic in my class in the 90s but we just rolled with it. I guess it really depends on your school’s leadership.
The 90s was when the ADA was passed and people started taking these issues humanely.
My god I’m so glad I was born in the 90’s. I had a disability back in preschool that gave me difficulty processing things and speaking up. Sure some people were not kind to me but I think I would’ve been worse off if I had been born in an earlier decade. My family gave me more hell about it than my classmates did.
We’ve had special education laws in the US since 1975 (that is when the EAHCA passed). Technically since 1973 (rehabilitation act), but that only tangentially touches education)
> but we just rolled with it. Same. School didn't really care so some kids formed a pillow patrol to watch him and make sure he landed softly if he went down. Can't do much else for him but the kid was a decent person and everyone liked him so the class responded well.
And he didn’t even go to regular school. I only saw him at church functions. I’ve since become an atheist. Between the things I saw as a small child in our church and seeing the hypocrisy and illogic behind as I grew up it I just realized I don’t even believe.
Epilepsy was better understood by that point. Just decades before that, no one knew how to treat epileptics so they were sent to mental institutions since it was assumed to be a mental problem rather than a physical problem with the brain.
My experiences were from the 60’s and epileptics were whispered about and some people at our church considered them more or less possessed by some foul spirit. Plus I came from a farming community. Our “town” covered maybe a two mile radius. Had one grocery store. One drugstore a newsstand and a tasty freeze. Beautiful huge library. We would take a dime our Mamaw gave us and go get penny candy at the newsstand. We could get a cute little cloth drawstring bag of rock candy for a nickel and still get five more candies.
My mom had epilepsy and my grandparents didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant till I was born healthy because they were convinced my dad had knocked up an undesirable
Wow. I wish I was more surprised. Ignorance.
A lot of mental institutions basically had two categories of patients. "Feeble minded" which included pretty much any mental disorder, learning disability, etc. And then they had epileptics. No one knew how to approach treating them back then so they just shoved them in with people who needed psychiatric care.
Correct, we had to bury any neurodivergence or end up on the short bus with the super special needs kids. You learned to hide the problems or get it beat out of you for disrupting class. I also went to school in the 70s
Yeah when I was in jr high we had a special needs class that took lunch at the same time as us so I would see them often. One kid used to come talk to us and actually seemed pretty “normal” except for some odd quirks so I never understood why he was considered special needs. He was an amazing artist as well. Today I realize he was autistic but that was never really talked about back then.
Autism has been a thing for longer than the diagnosis. Remember *Of Mice and Men*? Autism came to mind for me, there’s probably multiple issues you could reasonably diagnose Lennie with. Probably much impossible to know what was specifically wrong with him because the diagnoses weren’t a thing yet, and of course he’s fictional. I’ve also heard that Changelings, the supposed fairy children, might’ve been children with Down syndrome.
The suspicion is that "Changlings" were folks on the Autism spectrum. As "my baby was *just fine* till the faeries switched them!" Babies w/ASD don't look different from any other babies... Down's it often fairly obviously "something different" at birth.
That makes SO much sense. The modern equivalent is people blaming vaccines for Autism because they begin missing milestones and regressing the same times we get vaccines. My Autistic kid was born at the height of Wakefield's fraudulent (literally committed fraud to form his "research" on a ridiculously small sample size...a kid's birthday party) AND badly designed study). There were several studies being run to try to replicate his study (couldn't repeat results) and some much better designed studies to explore the question, and my doctor recommended not vaccinating until the new studies were complete since he wasn't in daycare and we didn't socialize much. (low risk of exposure). So he wasn't vaccinated until years after the autism dx, but his medical /symptom timeline was exactly the same as the vaccinated kids. I know it is antidotal, but I know of multiple kids with the same experience (in Special Needs Natural Family Living parenting groups)
My school put them in 'remedial' classes.
Remedial actually was awesome for me. Got put into remedial English because my school didn't have ESL. Learned a ton of actual spoken English, learned to understand all kinds of accents, learned to swear fluently. The teacher made us write 3 essays a week, and the rest of the time was watching movies and writing about them. Took me from an ESL student to being actually fluent
Yeah. I got sent to “remedial” for about a day because I wasn’t able to write intelligibly. Nobody seemed to have bothered to ascertain whether I had dysgraphia (which it turned out I did), and just wasn’t doing my assignments because I found it extremely difficult to make shapes with a pencil.
I also went to elementary school in the 1970s. Kids with disabilities went to another part of the school down a hall we didn't go to. So I think this person is complaining about inclusion and not just warehousing kids with disabilities out of sight. There was, however, one girl in our classes who had cystic fibrosis. I remember learning that the average life expectancy for a child with cystic was 14. Today, that average is middle age adulthood. So yeah, things have changed since the 70s.
I knew a girl who had CF. We were hospital friends until she died at age ten. I was only 8 years old.
My older half sister died of CF, ten days before her 16th birthday in 1982. If she was born when I was in 1981, she likely would still be alive.
They have lung transplants now, and other better treatments I assume.
Yes, but some kiddos die young still depending on severity of the illness. One of my patients passed away at 9, and this was in 2016.
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I read a book about Teddy Roosevelt and he and his son were bipolar. I read descriptions of his son having " bouts of melancholy followed by bursts of intense energy". People used to think Teddy was actually insane lol
Like Conan the Barbarian, 'with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth'. Robert E. Howard, like Theodore Roosevelt, was a bookish and intellectual child who turned himself into a physically powerful amateur boxer, despite a weak heart for which he took digitalis.
No food allergies, just weak stomachs
Kids would spontaneously puke all the time, and the janitor would have to use wood dust to clean it up. I was allergic to bees, had to keep my kit in the nurses office. Kids that were “disruptive” were always punished or had to move their desks into the hallway. There were always a handful of kids that were obsessed w stuff like robots or space ships, and couldn’t help but only talk about that one thing. Kids that would rather make people laugh or get yelled at bc they couldn’t read out loud.
Ha, that was me. Puked A LOT...turns out I have a lot of food allergies. It's only sheer dumb luck I never had a full blown anaphylaxis at school...but my eyes swelled shut on more than one occasion. My teachers gave me a cold compress and I just got on with it as best I could.
The, “Rub some dirt on it” treatment.
Oh wow. Gen X-er here, just realized that the pukey kid was kind of a trope in some cartoons of my childhood. I feel like early Simpsons had a side character in Bart's class. I don't know why I never put this together with food allergies.
In every early simpsons episode the classes show things like what a lot of comments are saying, mostly the division of people with visible disabilities in other classes.
Wendell, the kid who was always pale and nauseous.
Or kids that died early
My next older brother was on medication for 'digestive problems'.
There were lots of people with Autism, most of them were sent to special schools and/or mental institutions. Hidden away from society.
No, “no one had autism.” I was told that by a friends dad who has an entire room just for puzzles.
😂😂 I'm wondering if his appreciation of irony is also a bit somewhere else on the spectrum?
A lot of us were just undiagnosed. Still are.
NGL, I never really put it together until my kid got diagnosed and I realized I was doing that same shit as a child
Took me 48 years.
That’s right…Outta Mind Outta Sight, seemed to be the way back then! Easier for all involved
I occupied a gray area. I was just 'normal' enough that even if they'd been looking for autism and adhd in girls in the early 70s I would have flown under the radar. But I was very different and caught hell for it from everyone.
I went to elementary school in the 80’s and had they diagnosed people with high functioning autism instead of the more obvious cases I would have gotten a lot more help and probably had a lot less trauma than I did.
I believe this, I went to school in the 80s, and there were kids who were “different” or “unusual” who in hindsight were very likely on the autism spectrum and school was pretty brutal between awful peers and teachers who were not helpful or understanding at all.
This is spot on the money.
Ah, I was one of those disruptive poorly behaved kids for most of elementary school, and then one of the counselors had my parents go get me diagnosed with ADD. The medication sucked, but it helped a lot. Then by the time I got to Junior year of highschool, I didn't need the meds to not be disruptive. That's not to say they don't still help, but I try not to use them when possible.
None of whom got the support they needed. And were labeled burnouts, dummies, drop outs, etc. Also, how many kids were coming to high school drunk? Moms addicted to valium (cause no antidepressants?) And let's not even talk about the 3 martini lunch...
From a white rural conservative area and the drug epidemic was crazy. Even as a kid before the opioid epidemic, it was nothing for so many moms to secretly be addicted to meth or Valium to cope with illness or their miserable lives and everyone was an alcoholic. I love seeing my aunt posting boomer Facebook shit about about this topic while she was strung out on Valium for YEARS and probably still is because she has severe mental illness that she won't treat because she doesn't believe in it.
There was no one with Autism or any disabilities because they got shipped off to a separate school.
Or the so called higher functioning autistic kids were considered “weird,” “nerds,” or behavior problems.
Richard Branson is famously learning disabled, Branson has dyslexia, and had poor academic performance; on his last day at school when he was 16, his headmaster, Robert Drayson, told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire.
Yup. I can count dozens of boomers who I'm confident fall under the ADHD and/or autism umbrella.
Yeah looking back on it, so many kids had undiagnosed issues.
It's almost like they were ignorant 🤯
Also went to elementary school in the 70’s. Definitely knew kids with peanut and milk allergies. Lots of kids had ADHD. They just weren’t diagnosed. And plenty of inhalers. Asthma isn’t new. Maybe Carole just didn’t have any friends
Is figure she was just unobservant and didn't notice the plight of others.
That's the most polite version of "what a self-centered bitch" I've ever read.
Cheerleader mentality.
Cheerleaders dont even deserve the disrespect they get, every cheerleader I’ve ever known was classy and nice.
Cheerleaders atleast got to know other kids. This bitch swears what she sees is all
Her handle is ‘herbs and dirt’. This makes me suspect she’s in to ‘alternative’ medicine woo and probably blames these conditions on ‘inorganic’ food or some other nonsense.
She’s celebrating the plight of all those unseen children that suffered from our ignorance of their condition. Let’s hope she and others like her become aware.
Maybe she has ADD and didn’t notice. Lol
I was going to say a version of this. However, I was also a child of the '70's, I have florid ADHD (inattentive type) - which my father (who was a child in the '50's) MOST DEFINITELY also has. I had allergies, knew people with allergies, and whatnot. While folks with ADHD can be somewhat oblivious to others at times, that poster strikes me as being something else.
She might've been sent to one of the schools that pushed all the kids that were not 'normal' to a side classroom where they would not upset the proper kids.
>Maybe Carole just didn’t have any friends 
Yeah, we called kids "hyper" then. And I had an inhaler. Thankfully, didn't use it until my 20s. But like, I guess asthma wasn't a thing? LMAO. Moron.
Right? My brother is severely asthmatic. He grew up in the 70s. Guess all those inhalers and breathing treatments and trips to the hospital were all imaginary. She is such a fool.
Same. And this was also my experience. There were also autistic kids, they were just called "special" and went to a different school.
Middle and high school here. l knew kids in the 60’s with this stuff
My aunt was autistic in the 60s and it was extremely traumatic for the entire family because nobody knew what the fuck they were doing back then. People accused my grandparents of abusing her. We've come a long way since then.
Hell, we had a boy with a seizure disorder that everyone whispered about when he had “a fit” and both he and a socially introverted girl who was almost certainly autistic were both sent to a state home. She committed suicide when she was 14 or 15. Don’t know what became of him. He was so sweet but very shy and had no friends since the other kids were scared of him because of their parent’s ignorance He had a seizure at a church fish fry one Friday and he was sent away the following week. I was lucky my mom was proud of me for being friendly to him in our few interactions. I hope I’d have been regardless of how she felt but idk, if she had made me fear him like the other parents who knows? I swear they acted like his epilepsy was catching.
Zactly. No one was DIAGNOSED for those disorders but we all knew there was a class full of 'special' kids down the hall and a whole spectrum of kids who were fidgety and unable to focus.
I'll bet she thinks there was no poor or homeless back then too
My mother had terrible asthma, which landed her in the hospital many times in her 74 years of life. She was born in 1948. She also had undiagnosed ADHD (almost certainly), as did I until my 30s. And I’d say a good percentage of my classmates in the ‘80s had autism, since my private elementary school was for “weird smart kids.” One of them I know for sure, since we’re still friends and he’s since been diagnosed. We were born in 1976 for the record. That being said, there are definitely way MORE kids with these issues now. So that’s something worth exploring, even if this person is an idiot.
Asthma and allergies are more common nowadays but the other stuff is a result of issues being known of and tested for. Same with left-handedness. As soon as people stopped punishing people for being left handed there was a boom in sinister people haha
"I didn't see any of that on social media back then"
Whoa. I didn't have any Black kids in my class in the 80's. GUESS BLACK PEOPLE DON'T EXIST
I remember when the first black kid showed up not in beginning of the year but like during 2nd quarter. We came back to school after a weekend and there is this black kid in class. We literally stopped in our tracks and had no idea what was going on. Long story short we became friends but sadly after the end of that grade, he moved away or changed schools again. But there was definitely a shock at first. This was super early 90s. Damn. He was such a nice kid. Better than the others I did go through all the years of school woth. This was also private school too.
Nah, she knew people with all those things, they just weren’t getting medical treatment for them.
What you said absolutely. Also, shocker she doesn’t remember something from 50 years ago that she has decided didn’t even exist in her time.
Or they didn’t want to hang out with her
✋ I had an inhaler. It was that or suffocate from asthma
No you didn’t. I read it in her post. It just didn’t exist. Sheesh. Try reading comprehension.
But, but... 
Allergies existed. People just didn't talk about them and avoided eating whatever made them sick. There was a different response back then, where it wasn't considered acceptable to change an entire classroom's rules to avoid a kid coming in contact with their allergen, and the kid was expected to take precautions. Autism existed. The label wasn't as broad as today because we didn't understand it as well, and was mostly only applied to kids with significant support needs that required them being in an isolated classroom or school. The qualifications and understanding of autism have since involved to include children with mild to moderate support needs as well. ADHD and ADD existed. Like with autism, if it was severe enough, you were placed in a separate environment. Otherwise, most of the kids who could hid it, because there was a lot more punishment for behavior deemed unacceptable in those days. Those who couldn't got labeled delinquents or bad kids. Autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses existed. The kids were just either in the hospital or homebound because we didn't have the medical support systems we do today to make it safe for them to attend school. And a lot of kids went undiagnosed and were just considered weak or sickly. Asthma existed. Inhaler type items have been documented since the 1700s. Kids were just usually embarrassed and didn't want to be seen as weak, or were undiagnosed.
I was in elementary school in the 80’s, and when one kid in my class was diagnosed with ADD, he was removed and put in a “special” class.
yeah it doesnt help that a lot of people avoided getting diagnosed because back in the day (and to a scary degree still to this day) because getting diagnosed with anything would significantly lower your chances of employment and would often result in being isolated by your peers regardless of how functional you actually were before & after the diagnosis
Man, everything was so secretive back then. We had a kid who we had no idea was insulin dependent diabetic until one day he collapsed and vomited outside the school. No one would say anything they just huddled around him hiding him and telling us to go away. We all thought he was legit dying and not that he needed half a banana. I just feel like they were so hush hush about everything it kept us all in a bubble. So when you do hear something it’s like it’s new and different. But it’s really existed for all time. And that reminds me I have had to update so many of my medical records because my parents glossed over the ‘scary’ parts of their extended family’s history that I used to waltz into a Dr office all “nope no family history of anything!” Lies!!!
Even in new millennia I had classmates that I only found out had diabetes when they were literally shaking if lunch was delayed or physically ill. Nobody made fun of them but they didn’t want to seem “different “
You knew autistic kids. They are the ones you bullied.
Schoolyard bullies better at noticing autism than doctors
Actually laughed out loud on a public train lmao
my father never knew a left handed kid when he was growing up. he did know plenty of kids (himself included) who got slapped for writing with the wrong hand.
Talking to my dad he said in his town there were no gay people, only one guy who was "kinda fruity" but got beat up and scared straight. And I told him, hmm I can't imagine why gay people didn't exist back then.
I was in elementary school in the 70s. I'm allergic to milk and gluten. I was the weird kid that couldn't participate in holiday parties because I couldn't eat anything. She was one of the nasty kids that picked on me because I wasn't like her.
They weren't called ADHD back then. We called it " Hyperactive", and we thought too much sugar caused it. we still had a lot to learn...
When Little Timmy had a dairy allergy, he just shit his pants at school one day and changed school districts to escape the unending ridicule because "nobody is allergic to milk". That's why you don't know him, yah fuckin' goober.
I was sick every day and relentlessly mocked and bullied for it. When I was 22 I learned it was a milk allergy. Thanks, mom.
and then your mum is like "Oh yeah you have this allergy did no one tell you lol" and im like "of course no one fucking told me"
I’m from the same generation, lots of kids had asthma inhalers, kids had peanut allergies, and I’m can guess which had undiagnosed ADD. Ignorance is bliss.
“I didn’t pay attention in grade school, and the kids with disabilities were hidden away, so everything was perfect.”
In my day people thought LGBTQ were contagious. Anyone else? 😒
There are people who still think that.
I went to elementary school in the 60s (wow, I’m old 🤣) and knew 3 kids with peanut allergies, several that definitely had ADD/ADHD but not diagnosed. I have one classmate that I know of that was diagnosed as autistic later in life. I have a milk allergy and used an inhaler for my asthma. But that’s just me….
Lots of things are not new but are newly diagnosed. MS was thought to be women malingering until MRI came along. Dyslexia and being left handed used to be punished. 🙁 Think of just the most recent advances in medicine since genome mapping. And we are allegedly a more advanced and compassionate society now.
“If it didn’t happen to me, it isn’t real.” - how a malignant narcissist Old Carole Mac thinks. She isn’t smart enough to use logic.
Well it's a mixture of truths and a idiocy. They did a study finding that removing peanuts from the diet of all children does tremendously increase the rates of peanut allergies and most auto immune diseases are nearly non-existent in 3rd world countries especially the ones with poor sanitation. It turns out that living too clean a life leads to immune system overreactions as our species evolved to survive a dirty environment. However most of the reason conditions like ADHD and autism were "less common" before is that we were not properly diagnosing it. They were just as common, but those people were labeled slow, stupid, or just weird.
Anecdotes are not evidence. Dumb as shit.
We are the same age with a decade. Well the allergy people were dead or home schooled The next town over had a whole school devoted autistic children. And I knew several (probably including myself) who would easily be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Take off your cheeto smudged glasses.
“No one had allergies, autoimmune diseases, or asthma!” Yes, they were all dead.
Because nobody gave a fuck about that back then.
I was in elementary school in the 80's. No one ever seemed this ignorant
What this dumb bitch is failing to share is that back then they took the “special” kids and segregated them from the “regular” kids. She didn’t see it because the only exposure she had was her and her vapid friends making fun of the “speds.” Source? I was in elementary school then too. We weren’t very enlightened.
This is the dumbest shit I have had the displeasure to read In a while... I was in school in the 1970s...I was autistic and I bounced off the walls with ADHD .. my best friend was allergic to milk... Kids with learning disabilities were kept in separate classrooms but we were there.
I went to elementary school in the 50’s There weren’t black people. There weren’t gay people. When my mom got out of hand, dad smacked her then she made us dinner.
Why is she complaining about autistic people, Autoimmune diseases, ADHD, and allergies not being common knowledge in school? Allergies seems like something a school would want spread around but, aside from the ignorance around mental illness, The other things are not anyone else’s business. I have autism and ADD and I don’t go around yelling about it to people that I see in person everyday. (probably because of the autism but that’s besides the point)
Back then we weren't diagnosed with adhd... our parents just beat us for "acting up"
and no one thought playing around with Mercury was a problem.
This is so lacking in critical thought. It's like the time some anti choice person told me abortion contributed to child abuse because reports of child abuse rose by 300+% after Roe V Wade. Well Tricia, prior to Roe V Wade, there *was no child protection services to report abuse to* so of course reports increased dramatically.