The Great Modern Malady Merger

There was a time – not so very long ago – when a child who couldn't sit still was simply called "fidgety," and one who couldn’t focus was "daydreaming." The boy who climbed trees mid-maths lesson? “Spirited.” The girl who talked to herself in French and stapled leaves to her workbook? “Imaginative.” Now? ADHD. Or possibly a nut allergy. Or – in a daring plot twist – both.

You see, we've entered an era where every sniffle is histamine-related and every missed deadline is neurological. Can't sit still? ADHD. Can’t breathe? Allergy. Can’t sit still because you're wheezing from a peanut-induced anaphylactic fit while forgetting what you were meant to be doing in the first place? Congratulations – you're the final Pokémon evolution of modern diagnosis.

The statistics tell their own tale: rates of ADHD and allergies have risen faster than a gluten-free sourdough starter in a yurt full of hipsters. There’s a theory for everything, of course. One blames plastics, another blames smartphones, and a third – my personal favourite – blames it all on a lack of exposure to dirt, boredom, and robust parenting.

Let’s be honest – most of us older folk were marinated in allergens. Dust, pollen, dairy, bee stings, lead paint – all washed down with a glass of undiagnosed behavioural quirk. We didn’t get labels. We got shouted at. If you sniffled, you wiped it on your sleeve and were told to "get on with it." If you got distracted, you were smacked with a blackboard rubber and sent outside to “run it off.” It wasn’t therapeutic – but it was clarifying.

And the overlap between allergies and ADHD? Astounding. Almost suspiciously so. It’s as if modern children are less like human beings and more like experimental houseplants – exquisitely sensitive to light, sound, sugar, dairy, gluten, artificial colouring, and boredom. One whiff of a walnut or a two-minute wait for gratification, and it’s full system failure.

Of course, the industries have caught on. You can now buy hypoallergenic ADHD-friendly fidget toys – made of ethically sourced rubber and shaped like calming woodland creatures. If you twitch with purpose, it’s mindfulness. If you sniff while doing so, it’s a diagnosis.

And God forbid you bring in a birthday cake. One child’s got ADHD, another’s coeliac, three can’t go near dairy, and little Hugo turns blue if someone merely whispers “Brazil nut.” So it’s carrot sticks all round and a rousing game of “Name That Cognitive Disorder.”

But maybe – just maybe – we’re asking the wrong question. Perhaps it’s not that there are more neurodivergent, allergy-prone children. Perhaps it’s that our world has become an ADHD-inducing, allergy-triggering circus. Shiny screens everywhere. Constant dopamine hits. Artificial food. Parents half-listening while scrolling Instagram for gluten-free lunchbox ideas. No wonder everyone’s itchy and distracted – I’m halfway there myself just writing this.

In short: we’ve medicalised personality and pathologised normal variation, while feeding children beige, hyper-processed slop wrapped in polyethylene and expecting them not to develop a tic. If you wanted to design a world that breeds allergies and attention issues, you couldn't do better than the one we’ve got.

So the next time you sneeze mid-sentence and forget what you were saying – don’t worry. It’s probably just a side effect of being alive in the 21st century. Pass the antihistamines and the dopamine – we’ve got a world to diagnose.