However, the profoundly mistaken assumption behind giving these kids medications is that what we're dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and that the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. But if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, you'll see that they are normal when they're with their mothers, and when you separate them from their mothers, their dopamine levels go down within two or three days.
In other words, what we're doing is trying to correct a massive socioeconomic problem, that results in disconnection and the loss of nurturing, by feeding our kids chemicals! Granted that these stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are, in the short run, helped by them. The question is not so much whether these drugs should be used or not; the problem is that 80% of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that's all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it's seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, and not in any way as a problem of emotional environment and development. So our kids keep "acting out" and the total chemical dosage keeps increasing, as does their "acting out."
What does "acting out" mean?
When you hear the phrase "acting out," it usually means that a kid is behaving badly, that a child is being obstreperous, oppositional, violent, bullying, and/or rude. Most of us don't have the words and concepts that are necessary to say what's really going on. The phrase "acting out" means that you're referring to behavior which you haven't got the words to properly describe, within the limits of the vocabulary you possess. In a game of charades, you have to "act out" because you're not allowed to speak. If you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you were hungry, you would have to literally demonstrate your hunger, through behavior, by pointing to your mouth or to your empty belly, because you don't have the words that are required.
So yes, a lot of children are "acting out," but it's not just bad behavior. It's also a manifestation of emotional losses and emotional shortages in their lives. And whether it's bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we're dealing with here is childhood-stunted emotional development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or exclusively through medications, we need to somehow find a way to help these kids develop normally.
But many in America are moving in exactly the opposite direction
In 1998, there was a book that the New York Times named the best book of the year and it nearly won the Pulitzer Prize. It was called The Nurture Assumption. In this book, the researcher-author argued that parents don't really make any difference anymore! Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled "Do Parents Matter?" Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have only to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, "Does the mother cat make any difference?" or "Does the mother bear matter?" This author's research showed that children are now being influenced -- in their tastes, in their attitudes, and in their behaviors -- by peers more than by parents. And this poor researcher thereby concluded that this is somehow natural! Her badly mistaken presumption was that what is the behavioral norm in North America . . is actually natural and healthy. In fact, it isn't.
If your spouse or partner came home from work and didn't
give you the time of day and got on the phone and talked with other people all
the time and spent all their time on email talking to other people, your
friends wouldn't say, "You've got a behavioral
problem on your hands and you should try tough love." What they'd say is that you've got a relationship problem. Yet when children
act in these ways, the vast majority of Americans have been taught to think they
have a behavioral problem, and then
they try and control or reshape those "bad' behaviors.
In fact, what our children are showing us is that we have a relationship problem with them. They weren't/aren't connected enough with us and were/are too connected to their peer group. That's why they want to spend all their time with their peer group and very little with their parents. And now we've given kids the technology with which to do exactly that. So the terrible downside of the Internet and their cell phones is that now kids are spending way too much time with each other, and way too little with their parents.
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