Judith Warner initially planned to write a book on how American children were falsely diagnosed and over-medicated by thoughtlessly competitive parents seeking a quick fix for their perfectly healthy (albeit quirky) children, for reasons ranging from enhancing their competitive edge (e.g. to raise their "B" grades to "A" grades) to "calming them down" to make parenting easier. She admits she once strongly believed, as many do, that hordes of children were medicated for "flavor of the week" disorders by lazy parents and unscrupulous doctors, and at the recommendation of teachers who needed their young charges to sit still for hours on end at school. What she discovered, however, after seeking such people...is that she couldn't find them. What she discovered instead were parents of sometimes desperately ill children who finally turned to medication (sometimes after years of "denial" about their child's illness) in desperation, more often than not as a last resort, and with great guilt, after trying every other nutritional or behavioral therapy they could identify. To all those adults who ask "where were all these children before when we were growing up?," Ms. Warner notes that they were always there. It's not that there are so many more now -- it's just that now we know what to look for. A kid with what we now know as Asperger's was once just labeled "weird." Similarly, we all knew kids with ADHD in school -- they were the wild, undisciplined kids who couldn't behave (not "wouldn't," but actually couldn't), or couldn't perform, or were labeled "stupid" or "lazy" and for whom the "treatment" ranged from failure to spanking. Ask any adult who lived through ADHD as a kid -- they remember, and they will tell you it exists. In serious cases of mental illness, children were labeled as anything from "retarded" to any other number of other maladies, and parents were urged to send them away to hospitals or institutions, perhaps forever. We're not talking about "quirky" or "different" kids here, or rough-housing little boys who are simply expelling energy -- we're talking about children that are often suffering terribly from the disorders that plague them. Ms. Warner also dispels the myth that practically "all" children are on medication. In fact, a very small percentage of children are medicated, probably fewer than actually need treatment. Most compellingly, she notes that, while it is encouraged, and even admired, for an adult to admit to and seek treatment for a mental illness, for some reason people don't want to extend that same privilege to children. That there is the idea that we should, without reservation, celebrate these "quirks" and "differences" and allow children to "outgrow" them, or alternatively that such children are simply budding geniuses and that treating them would stifle their creativity. What people seem to ignore while they are romanticizing these "differences" is that the children in question are often suffering terribly. Ask any parent of a child with ADHD so severe that they cannot function on any level at school or in social situations, for whom medication has allowed them to at least function on a fairly normal level, how "wonderful" it was for their children before this help became available. Thank you, Thank you Judith Warner, for speaking up for these parents who are simply trying their best in the face of this prejudice.
