I think this explains at least some of it. In my childhood (1970s) as best I recall, these kids were hidden away. They went to separate special education schools or a separate classroom in the main school and didn't really mix with the rest of the kids. Today the attempt is made, for better or worse, to mainstream everyone as much as possible.

It still feels like there is more autism today compared to then though. I would guess that it's some combination of more people waiting to have kids until they are older, environmental factors, mania about cleanliness and sanitizing everything, maybe social factors such as putting more kids in daycare at a very young age, IDK. I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc. It was unusual among my friends as a kid, at least I don't remember it being common.

(read the other replies first, they make good points)

I knew plenty of kids in the 1970s that were "a little off" (probably including me), but they were not so bad that we would remove them from society which was the only option back then so we called them normal. Now that we have treatment we give it not only to those so autistic that they can't function in society at all, but also those who could function but not well and treat them.

> I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc.

I mean, if you were deathly allergic to eggs in the 1800s, you died. Very early.

If smoke sent you into respiratory distress, you died. Very early.

Or see the "left-handedness epidemic". It is probably not massively more prevalent now than it was in 1900s, even if that's what the stats say. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-overall-rate-of-left...

In the 1970s it was still easy to just abandon the school system. Kids who didn't obviously thrive were usually treated as family burdens, and still mostly removed from society.

They also usually died young.

People with ADHD for example, are more prone to abusing drugs and alcohol. How many people died from alcoholism who were untreated ADHD cases?

>It still feels like there is more autism today compared to then though.

This is objectively true, do you know why? We changed the name of really poorly functioning people in some cases from "Mentally retarded" to "Autistic".

That's it.

Look at a graph of generic "mental retardation" diagnosis and it's fall coincides with the "rise" of autism diagnosis. Those people were always actually autistic, but we did not have the institutional knowledge and tools to know that, because the science of psychiatry and psychology is still in its infancy and struggled with rampant a-scientific thought even into today. Jordan Peterson for example is a "Jungian" trained psychologist even though that's not science, and he was fired when his college discovered he was leaning more on that unscientific worldview than actual hard science in his college courses.

>I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc.

The food allergies is real because a bunch of doctors were "nervous" about babies with peanut butter allergies, and without any scientific study or consideration, spent over a decade recommending parents not expose kids to peanuts.

Now that we have actually done the science, we know that was dead wrong, completely irresponsible, unscientific, and directly responsible for something like 8 million fully preventable peanut allergies. That's what happens when you let even medical professionals use their "intuition" rather than hard data. This is why medical studies blind those professionals. Doctors are not usually scientists.

There is no education that removes human biases and cognitive missteps, and it is impossible to cure yourself of the standard human fallacies. Statisticians can still become gambling addicts, and can still suffer from gambling fallacies when not being rigorous.

>I would guess that it's some combination of more people waiting to have kids until they are older, environmental factors, mania about cleanliness and sanitizing everything, maybe social factors such as putting more kids in daycare at a very young age, IDK.

The only one of these with any real evidence is that Geriatric Pregnancy is a known risk factor for autism. Everything else is nonsense.

Don't feed into the rampant misinformation and malicious refusal to learn what is already known by throwing out baseless guesses and letting them carry any weight. How often has one of your customers correctly guessed what caused a bug without understanding, access, and rigor? You are doing the same.