As a parent, I have participated in many discussions regarding the medication of kids for a variety of reasons. I have friends who have kids with serious problems for whom medication has been a godsend, allowing them to function with relative normalcy. Kids who were unable to participate in a typical classroom for one behavioral issue or another.
We’ve also had many discussions about the problem of over-medicating children, and how some schools push for difficult children to receive behavioral meds, whether they truly need them or not. How some of those adult medications should perhaps not be so quickly prescribed for children. We’ve talked about education reform, changes in teaching methods and school culture and administrative philosophies that would allow for wider ranges of learning styles. I’ve heard parents rant about how unfair it is for their well-behaved child to not receive the same level of attention as the “problem kid” in the class commands, and I’ve seen them answered by the parents of said problem kids with an invitation to trade shoes, just for a day.
[1]I homeschooled my own daughter for four years, primarily because we traveled extensively, but also partially because being in a traditional classroom was difficult for her when she was younger due to sensory integration problems stemming from her time in an orphanage. She could not properly filter sound; a quiet classroom drove her crazy because every deep breath or sigh, every shuffle of a page or tap of a pencil was like crashing thunder in her ears. We found that headphones with music worked wonders – and she is still more productive when her brain is managing music AND her studies. Silence remains a problem. She would hum and chatter and tap and drive everyone around her bonkers with her sounds to fill a silent room, but without them, she felt lost. She’s matured out of a lot of it, but the teachers who allow her to wear her earbuds while researching, for instance, consistently get the best work from her. We were told early on that some medications might be helpful for her, but we decided to work with her behaviors and modify those slowly before we took the more drastic step to medicate. Fortunately, she made good progress and we avoided that step, at least for now.
Her dad was most definitely one of those kids who, had there been drugs for ADD and ADHD when he was a kid, would have been on them. He barely made it out of school and was constantly in trouble for disrupting the class, for being the clown, for demanding attention, etc. Had I been his teacher along the way, I’d probably have wanted him “managed” with medication – anything! – as well. But he did squeak through to graduation and is now a successful radio host, making his living as humorist who needs to be the center of attention. We’ve often wondered where his path might’ve led had he been medicated all those years ago, years when, as it turns out, he was merely honing his craft.
I certainly don’t have the answers, and honestly, I worry more about what is causing the seemingly alarming increases in childhood neurological disorders than about how to manage them. I know where my daughter’s came from – what about all the kids who have been well-nurtured since birth, and still wind up with behavioral problems stemming from apparent brain abnormalities or developmental sideroads? Have these conditions always been with us to the degree they are now and only recently been named? ADD, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, attachment disorders, sensory integration disorders, OCD, dyspraxia, apraxia, and the myriad other learning disorders being diagnosed in this new century? Is it food additives? Is it hostile environmental toxins? The trend towards hands-off parenting from which our culture fortunately seems to be recovering, when babies traveled in plastic buckets more often than in their parents’ arms? I don’t know, but I believe discovering the causes is as important as finding cures or managerial therapies and medications.
And then I read that those medications so many parents have counted on or deeply questioned are proving to be an even greater danger than before [2]. So where do we go from here?
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