Why do kids need Ritalin? Sure, because they’re anxious. But WHY are they anxious???

Education vs. Business blogspot ^ | 8/19/2013 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Wall Street Journal misses implications of its own story.

---This is an important post if you teach in a school where Ritalin is often prescribed. Or if you have children who are taking Ritalin.---

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about whether Ritalin works. I believe they missed the main point.

Ritalin works if by that you mean it calms children down. Ritalin does not work if by that you mean they will automatically become better students, or that their underlying problems will be solved.

The tendency in the schools is to act as though anxiety is a primary disease, not a symptom. So if they can eliminate the anxiety, all problems are solved, and the schools can go on doing what they were doing, which may be a slavish reliance on the wrong teaching methods.

It’s been a recurrent theme for many decades, in books about reading, that when children fall behind their friends, they feel miserable and defeated. They know that their parents and teachers are whispering about them. A year or two later, when the gap is greater and obvious to everyone, these kids become quietly crazy.

Just imagine that you are unable to do something simple that all the people in your social group can do. When you reveal that you can’t do it, they smile and joke in a condescending way.

If you don’t know the capital of France, you can suggest that you know other capitals. But if your friends are reading a book, there is no way to hide that you don’t know what’s on that first page.

Long story short, if a child reaches the fourth, fifth or sixth grade and is still illiterate, that child often starts dreaming about dropping out of school... as soon as he is old enough.

Many such children start having imaginary sicknesses so they can stay home. Many pretend they don’t like books. A boy might tough it out by saying, “Books are for girls. I hate reading.”

So we have bad teaching methods leading to unhappy children. These children end up seeing a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnoses them as having ADHD and they are told to take Ritalin. This puts a band-aid over the problem.

So the very first question that should be asked when a child is anxious and unhappy is this: can this child read?? Don’t be fooled by empty terms like “grade level.” Give him a newspaper, find out if he can read a paragraph.

If you can’t, first turn him into a reader with intensive phonics, and then see how he is feeling.

A lot of experts (in various books written over the years) mention in passing that these troubled children often become magically better. Their anxiety and dyslexia fade away. These problems, in many cases, were not real to begin with. That’s the story the Wall Street Journal should have reported.

See "In report on children and Ritalin, the Wall Street Journal skips over real story."

http://www.examiner.com/article/in-report-on-children-and-ritalin-the-wall-street-journal-skips-over-real-story?no_cache=1376076048 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CODA: There is an unholy configuration here. Whole Word = poor reading = anxiety = Ritalin. Together these seem to be part of a larger phenomenon called The War on Boys. See "What really happened to boys?"

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/what_really_happened_to_boys.html

END POST

[isom35]

The Enterprise once needed Ritalin to fight an outbreak of Rigelian fever. Or was it Ryetalyn? Hmmmmm.....

[potlatch]

Bad parenting leads to rowdy children that bad teachers can’t handle. Lack of discipline. I saw it start happening when I taught Physical Ed, long ago. Teachers, who couldn’t control their classrooms started demanding that some students be ‘medicated’.

Good teachers will not like that statement but I found it to be true and saw it happen a lot. When I was in school, long ago, there were NO undisciplined children - after the first time!

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Bon,

That is a sad and strange story, what those overweight people wanted.

I tend to think recess and exercise should be considered necessary and nonnegotiable. As you say, those things are just as important as anything else going on in the classroom.

[kevkrom]

My eldest isn’t ADHD but can be a bit unfocused at times. I let him have a Mountain Dew sometimes before a baseball/soccer game (he doesn’t really drink soda otherwise), and it seems to help his focus, but that might be the placebo effect in his case - he believes it will help him, so it does.

[Truth2012]

I have been saying it for many years. There is no ADD/ADHD outbreak. It was invented. I actually know it was invented, because I know for a fact that therapists had to put different tests together, which were not designed to go together, to come up with a diagnosis for “ADD”.

Saw it with my own two eyes.

ADD is a myth. If a child can focus on ANYTHING, they do not have a focusing problem.

If they can concentrate on video games, they have NO focusing problem.

Yes it really is AS simple as: Children are bored in school because school is a horrible and abusive place, designed to make many simple jobs for simple people.

Schools are so much more a function of welfare for the adults, than education for the children.

WHY would anyone allow THAT system to define their children and their children’s future? Wake up. Parents are not raising their children to have self control. It is a power play between children and adults. We have conditioned our children that if they want attention FROM us, they have to have “ADD”.

People who medicate their children for ADD are setting themselves up for suicide and drug abuse at an alarming rate.

IF you for a moment think your child’s adolescence was trying.. just wait for a drug using, depressed teenager.

[easylearnreading]

I agree that some high school students struggle to survive all day in school, lol some even consider it’s like prison. He/she feels defeated and stupid when they can’t do a simple thing, which is done easily by their friends. Why is it happening? Is it because WE as parents rely on outsiders to do what are rightly parental tasks? Teaching starts in the womb, and continues at super rates until they reach around 7, their brains are so hungry for and to absorb information their abilities are super human, literally. Take responsibility for your child’s future; give them the start they need to excel in life links.

Daniel P. Warren