I should have felt shocked when I read that one in eight parents now report that their child has a disability. That means that 12 per cent of British children – around 1.7million young people – are classified as suffering from a long-term illness, disability or impairment, according to figures just released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
These figures have almost doubled since 2015, when around seven per cent of parents reported that their child had a disability. This massive expansion in the number of children deemed to be disabled has been driven by a dramatic increase in the number of kids diagnosed with so-called behavioural issues, such as autism and ADHD. According to the DWP, ‘behavioural issues’ now account for two-thirds of childhood disabilities.
The reason I’m no longer surprised by the rise and rise of childhood disability is that I have been tracking this development for well over three decades. Back in 1996, I remember when UK government officials discovered that between 1985 and 1996, there had been a 40 per cent increase in the proportion of British people who consider themselves disabled. According to the survey, the increase was much higher among teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19. It seemed that the younger you were, the more likely it was that you would have a disability.
The authors of that survey concluded that the difference between the 1985 and 1996 figures ‘appears too large to be explained by a real increase in the prevalence of disability’. This is hardly a surprise. After all, there had been no war or outbreak of serious disease in this period that would have rendered swathes of the population infirm. That the authors couldn’t explain this epidemiologically extraordinary figure in the 1990s is entirely understandable. Thirty or 40 years ago, society had a far more limited view of who was considered disabled.
The explanation for this unexpected rise in the number of young disabled people does not lie in the field of epidemiology, but in the realm of a culture that invites people to classify themselves as infirm. It is important to stress that how people cope with negative experiences is strongly influenced by the cultural and historical factors that shape the way people make sense of them. Such cultural factors may increase or reduce the ability of the individual to cope with adverse circumstances.
In recent decades, the meaning of disability has undergone a dramatic semantic shift. This is part of a broader trend by which negative aspects of human experience and behaviour have become medicalised. In addition, an enormous disability lobby has emerged, which constantly demands that a variety of newly discovered disabilities be recognised with a formal diagnosis. The most important achievement of this lobby has been to alter public perceptions of the relationship between ability and disability. It has also succeeded in transforming what used to be characterised as children’s bad or problematic behaviour into medical issues.
Many of the ‘behavioural problems’ now designated to children have always been part of family life. Disobedience, aggression, disruptive and anti-social behaviour – now defined as ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ – have always posed a challenge to parents and schools. Yet these difficult patterns of behaviour are now often branded as psychological or medical issues. And so they become accepted, rather than something to be amended by adult guidance or firm discipline.
Clearly, parents are now actively courting disability diagnoses for their children. After all, the discovery of newly invented childhood disorders provides a welcome explanation for their children’s bad behaviour or poor performance in school: ‘She isn’t naughty, she is ill.’ It is also undeniable that the many welfare benefits now offered to parents with disabled children have also played a role. Nor can we ignore the role of teachers, some of whom are promoting the diagnosis of ADHD as an alternative to managing bad behaviour in the classroom through discipline and authority. A pupil’s failure to finish homework, inability to focus on class discussion and boredom in school are now blamed on some ‘condition’.
Unsurprisingly, over the past 30 or so years, children have internalised the disability narrative. Today’s young people readily communicate their problems in a psychological vocabulary. They describe their feelings in terms of stress, trauma and depression.
One of the gravest consequences of the disability culture is that many children no longer attend school at all. Last year, it was reported that the number of children missing more than 50 per cent of the school year in Oxfordshire had increased by more than five times in 10 years. This has been put down to ‘emotionally based school avoidance’, in which a child cannot attend school due to anxiety or stress. Half of UK secondary pupils avoided school due to anxiety at some point in the past year.
As a child, I can testify that my friends and I were more than happy to avoid going to school, and we had more than our share of anxiety. But we also knew that our parents and the rest of adult society had no sympathy for our predicament, and that not going to school was not an option. These days, adult society has become complicit in normalising truancy.
It is about time that society woke up to the fact that the current epidemic of childhood disability is not a medical problem. It is a cultural failure. Telling children that they are disabled, and unable to cope with the demands of life, is setting them up for a life of dependency and unfulfilled potential. Our children deserve better.
Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.
