[Pan_Yans Wife]

Wanna bet the diagnosis will start to drop statistically, once the parents start to be told that they themselves need to be medicated? :)

[Support Free Republic]

Rank	Location	Receipts	Donors/Avg		Freepers/Avg		Monthlies
12	New Jersey	515.00	11	46.82	347	1.48	170.00	8

Thanks for donating to Free Republic!

Move your locale up the leaderboard!

[ProudGOP]

''The evidence is dramatic and the message clear: We need to treat the whole family, not just the child,''

WooHoo! Ritalin for everyone

[Ann Archy]

Wow...finally!! I canot believe that sooooo many parents have kids that take these drugs.

[tiki]

I agree. I know some think that ADHD doesn't exist but I have it and so does my youngest son. The thing to do is to recognize it and deal with it...NOT with drugs. They need to be told that they have to sit on that energy until an appropriate time and they need to have strong disipline. I always got glowing reports on my son's school behavior but I had to provide him a couple of hours a day more than most children of (hyper)active time.

[GulliverSwift]

In other news: Reporters who write articles promoting the doping of America are the real ones who need medication.

[thoughtomator]

ooh that's gotta hurt

[Capriole]

I think you are being a bit unfair here. Why is it difficult to believe that some children might have something wrong with their brains as other children have something wrong with their livers, or kidneys, or eyes?

I have a fine son, nearly ten. He is intelligent, imaginative, creative, and beautifully behaved; I'm often complimented on his gentlemanly manners and deportment. He is certainly not hyperactive. But he cannot focus and remember anything for more than a second or two. You can try any teaching method you like--God knows we have tried everything!--but to save his life he cannot remember what 2 + 5 is. He will be ten in two months and has no more math skills than he had in first grade, yet he can memorize the entire script of a movie upon hearing it one time. Teachers, tutors, his mother, and his math-professional father have struggled with him. He can't write forward, from left to right, in a legible fashion, and can only do mirror-writing. He will ask a question and can't recall the answer five seconds later, yet he can tell you about all the troop movements at Gettysburg, for three days, in three dimensions. He has some real hemispheric wiring problems.

This is a child who is very frustrated, very unhappy, filled with sorrow and embarrassment because of his memory problems. And these problems are very typical for kids with ADD. Will medication help? I don't know; we just started him on it the other day as an act of desperation, after everything else had failed. I pray it will work.

Whether it works or not, however, I profoundly resent the clear statements by people on this thread that this boy's father and I are giving him medication because we are lazy, or don't want to discipline him, or are after SSI payments, or are psychologically unwell ourselves, or have some fundamentally selfish goal. We are doing it because no teaching method anyone has been able to devise has helped him learn. We allowed him to be identified as an ADD child because as such he receives some extra tutoring and access to some special programs. Will this scar him or cause his teachers to be prejudiced against him? Not, I'm sure, any more than the unbroken string of Fs on his report cards.

[ladylib]

I think we all should take drugs and see psychiatrists.

[texpat72]

I wonder how many people with "ADD" children have first tried something as simple as taking their children off of sugar, before trying Ritalin? My children literally bounce off the walls if they've had sugar. Simple solution, no drugs needed.