Is it Autism or Just Bad Parenting?

Amid a surge in autism diagnoses, Arthur Mann found a friend’s children detached and glued to their screens. Is it not more likely, he wonders in the Spectator, that we are suffering from an epidemic of disastrously bad middle-class parenting? Here’s an excerpt.

I recently reconnected with an old friend; I went to his house and met his children for the first time. One of them looked up from his screen as we entered the room, faintly curious about the intrusion. The other, with his back to us and his face obscured by a hoodie, didn’t bother. My friend announced their names as if that was sufficient introduction, but it felt weird that the children did not say hello and that one of them did not even show his face. Was something wrong with him? It was a bit creepy. Obviously I let it go. Maybe he was chronically shy or autistic, or facially disfigured. But the brother didn’t behave very differently, so probably not.

It later emerged that Hidden Face did indeed have ‘social-connection issues’ and that his parents were thinking of seeking a diagnosis for autism. By that time, he had deigned to show his face briefly. He shot his mother a venomous glance when she nervously suggested he might sit up for lunch. He whispered some compensatory demand that was instantly granted. I dread to think what it was. I wanted to shake the parents by the shoulders until some sense emerged. Instead, we had a pleasant chitchat about where to go on holiday and what to watch on Netflix.

It chilled me, the glance he shot his mother. It should have earned him a stern rebuke. But it seemed that he was holding an invisible Kalashnikov. His parents feared him. It chilled me but didn’t massively surprise me. Depressingly, I have seen many such cases.

Most readers will agree with the next sentence strongly, but will seldom have seen its sentiment in print. We are suffering an epidemic of disastrously bad middle-class parenting. Dramatically spoiled children are no longer a Roald Dahl rarity but are semi-normal, and many parents dodge blame through the procurement of a diagnosis of this or that condition. …

To be clear, I am not arguing that most children diagnosed with a behavioural condition are really just spoiled. I know some families with autistic children who have worked hard to socialise them, to ensure that they greet family friends when they come round, and so on. But I also know families where the source of the problem is clear as day: the parents have drifted into the terrible habit of failing to teach their children how to behave.

I nearly wrote ‘of failing to discipline their children’. Maybe that word is best avoided, as it suggests six of the best and so on. But discipline really just means teaching, or maybe ‘deep-teaching’. And a child must be taught how to behave around other people – how to keep quiet about his or her desires, how to behave in a vaguely formal way, even at home if people come round. Even this might sound a bit harsh and Victorian to some. “We don’t want him to conform and be polite, we want him to be himself,” a parent might say. But this is a subtle cruelty, because it will lead him to be disliked.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Nigel Farage has said GPs are “massively over-diagnosing” children with special educational needs and disabilities. During a press conference in Dover, the Reform leader criticised an overdiagnosis of “those with mental illness problems and… other general behavioural disabilities”.

So many of these diagnoses – for SEND before 18, for disability register after 18 – so many of these have been conducted on Zoom, with the family GP. I think that is a massive mistake.

If I’m your family GP, and I’ve known your family for generations, and you’re saying to me ‘doc, there’s a real problem here with depression’, or whatever it may be, it’s quite hard for me as your GP to say no.

So I don’t think any of these allocations should be done by family GPs. I think they should be done independently.

I think we are massively – I’m not being heartless here, I’m being frank – I think we are massively over-diagnosing those with mental illness problems and those with other general behavioural disabilities.

And I think we’re creating class of victims in Britain who will struggle ever to get out of it. That’s not good for them and it’s not good for us, so I worry about those things.

I do accept though, I do accept that repeated lockdowns – particularly the third lockdown – were probably the biggest mistakes ever made by a peacetime government in this country. And they have caused great long-term harm.