It could be just that odd phenomenon – once you have noticed one you just keep noticing more & more, something which was actually there all the time. I don’t think there can have been some sudden upsurge in accidents at birth, or congenital problems, or nasty disease which we would probably have heard all about by now.
The children I am thinking of are aged about 3 to 7 –part of the current baby boom, so you would expect the numbers to increase. It may also be that there is an almost uniformity in the wheelchairs – perhaps a new, or at least local, NHS standard. None is electric, they still need to be pushed by someone & they look rather like a snazzy director’s chair in black. The seat is pretty high off the ground & they have very manoeuvrable wheels.
My best guess is that this just reflects the great improvements that there have been in making everywhere, at least in towns, much more accessible to people with all kinds of mobility problem – ramps, automatic doors etc etc so that now any family with a disabled child can go out just as easily as any other. I have even seen a bus driver have to tell one family, which he clearly hated having to do, that they would have to wait for the next bus because he already had a wheelchair on board. Fortunately on that particular route they should not have had more than 5 minutes to wait.
The other thing, which is going to make me sound patronising at best, is that these children seem to be extremely lively, healthy & happy. My reason for mentioning that fact is that it makes me feel that the kind of therapies & hard work described in Blue Sky July are now the norm, rather than the old fashioned way of a sadly head shaking “They’ll never amount to much.” And of course being able to join in & socialise, experience the same outings as everybody else, can only help with that process.
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