I'm sure by now everyone's seen one of the articles about the idiots in Oregon who thought their son had a confusion backlash and ignored the fact that he was GOING INTO SEPTIC SHOCK. I don't really have anything new to say there — like, yeah, no shit, the parents missed a whole lot of blatant symptoms, there's a reason they're being charged with medical neglect, even if they had been correct that their child was awakening they still should have taken them to the hospital, I'm not going to say that case is typical.

But even if you're very sure you've noticed all your kid's symptoms (or your college roommate's symptoms, or what have you)?

Your kid is still almost certainly not awakening.

The best estimates we have suggest that about 1 in 50,000 people will end up awakening as espers. It's a law of the internet that if you talk about how rare something is, ten people will immediately show up in your comments section to tell you how it happened to them, and people's intuitions about frequency here are often a bit skewed regardless, so let's go through a couple comparisons. Excluding people who immigrated to the US after awakening, the US has about twice as many people who are currently professional athletes as it has espers, before you even count former pro athletes who've retired. The odds that your child will be struck by lightning at some point in their life are about three times higher than the odds that they'll awaken as an esper.

Something I hear sometimes is "well, sure, the odds are 1 in 50,000 normally, but they're in the right age range, so it's higher for them." This... is not how math works. It's not that people have a 1 in 50,000 chance of awakening each year on average, higher in some years and lower in others; that 1 in 50,000 chance is split up over their late teens and early twenties, so that the odds of someone awakening as an esper in any given year, even the year they turn eighteen, is lower. (Let alone the odds that someone would have an awakening in any given week.)

Yes, all of this still applies even if your kid is showing some kind of weird, confusing symptom. Like, adolescent schizophrenia has an estimated prevalence of a little over 0.2%, rising if you include people in their early twenties, or a little over 1 in 500, making it roughly one hundred times as common as being an esper. And that's before getting into people who are so convinced their precious little child is going to be an esper that they mistake appendicitis for a pain backlash, or food poisoning for a nausea backlash, or who can't believe their kid would possibly be depressed enough to attempt suicide and try to explain it away as an awakening. 

And don't even get me started on the people who've apparently never heard of the concept that eyes can look like slightly different colors in different lighting.

Look, I know it would be nice if every teen-onset illness could be solved by keeping them alive for a week and waiting it out, but that doesn't mean you can.