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DUH! Parents today are just weenies - trying to "befriend" their darlings and afraid to be parents!

That's an ignorant statement. I'm a parent of a son with ADHD, and I can assure you we are not afraid to parent.

"Hyper" as you describe your son and ADHD are not necessarily the same. Some is behavioral. Some is not.

Too many kids are medicated who should not be. But the fact is, some kids need it.

From the article:

"Jacobs acknowledged that many parents would disagree with him. Parents tend to believe what has become the mainstream view, in part because the drugs prescribed for ADHD do work in that they make the child more docile and more compliant.

'The child's not getting into trouble at school any more. The child's easier to manage at home, so we say, well this is great, it works.'

Also, parents struggling with a behavior problem were made to feel better. Instead of feeling inadequate as parents, they felt they were now struggling with a sick child and doing the best they could."

My son has ADHD - it's real, and medication helps him tremendously. We tried many other alternatives - vitamins, diet changes, behavior mod, social skills classes, etc. - before giving in to meds, after extensive testing by a psychologist and a psychiatrist that we've known for 30 years and trust. The medicine has helped a great deal - he is not on Ritalin but on one of the other meds. For example, he was unable to learn to read until we started medication - he literally couldn't keep focused long enough to sound out the word - then he suddenly began to read whole sentences. It was amazing.

I think the problem is that -- with the financial incentives that exist to over-diagnose -- you have a core of actual sufferers from the condition in the middle, and a penumbra of doubtful cases outside that, and outside that the poor kids whose parents don't care, or just want them to shut up, or wish that the ADD meds would easily solve whatever problem their child really has. Wishful thinking, because the effects of the medication on a true ADHD sufferer are so dramatic.

That's an ignorant statement. I'm a parent of a son with ADHD, and I can assure you we are not afraid to parent.

You go!!!! I TOTALLY agree...and that IGNORANT AND SELF RIGHTEOUS statement about the majority of the kids being from single parent families is just another prejudice. Probably propegated by those who are NOT parents...it's so easy for those who are not parents to give advice on parenting, although I regard advice from non-parents kinda like the war advice from "arm chair generals" both do not have all the information, but at least in the case of the arm-chair generals they do have SOME battle experience!!!!

I will agree that there are TOO MANY mis-diagnosis, but I would wager most of the overdiagnosed cases are from upper class weenie parents that want the "perfect" child. Not from those of us who work our butts off to discipline, not befriend, and take care of a child. I have child that has gone WAY beyond ADHD, she is bipolar, OCD & anti-social contact disorder. I will ASSURE you that from the time we started working with her (age 7) we (her father and I) went every route we could BUT medication. Yes, I am a single parent, but that had NO bearing on if she is ADHD,bipolar or other. That started long before I became a single parent...perhaps look at the parents that "run away" from the "difficult" children as the weenies. The divorce rate is FAR higher in families with children with these kind of problems because everyone wants to point the finger of blame or worse, ignore the problem, rather than deal with it!!!

I did not start medicating her until age 12 when she became abusive, violent & self mutalating, winding herself up in the hospital. Until you've walked a mile in our (the parents who do deal with this) shoes....perhaps you best save your opinions for yourself. I am so damn tired of this being made a liberal"socialist" vs. conservative issue...it is NOT...it's a medical issue, got it???? Good!!!

There are just as many conservative parents that deal with it as liberals, and I can assure you that 80% of us who did go with medication tried EVERYTHING we could before we medicated.

A boot up the ass approach often NEVER works with these kids as they "just don't care" and they will become equally violent with you.

My problem with the ADD diagnosis is that it's just to flip. My son was diagnosed with ADAD and I fought it for FOUR YEARS. Did he have issues? Yup. Was it ADHD? Nope. He was a celiac and nobody knew it. Something just told me that his behavior was a symptom, not a diagnosis. It took a long time to figure it out and a lot of doctors told me that I was wrong, but I didn't give up. Now he's calm, stubborn, happy, imaginative, bored and willful, but he's also managable... "normal."

Another thing that irritates the h#ll out of me are the mothers who tell me, "My little Johney's problems can't be food issues. I've tried eliminating everything I can think of and nothing works. My son's pediatric GI told me that it takes SIX MONTHS for the brain to BEGIN recovering from a food intollerance. He also told me that he has CURED EVERY CHILD WHO HAS COME TO HIM OF ADD, ODD, ADHD, etc by changing their diet for a period of one year. But one year is way to long for most parents and schools to wait, so they just medicate the kids and sigh and say that there's nothing else to do. ("I took my son off everything; sugar, red dyes, gluten, milk for a MONTH and he didn't improve..." It takes 6 months! That's like saying, "I've been pregnant for a whole month and the baby didn't come. I guess I need surgury to have it removed." These things take time, for the love of Pete!)

ADD symptoms are also the same symptoms a child will show when they are sick. When they are tired. When they are in chronic pain and can't even pinpoint, verbalize or understand what they are feeling they will act out. When they are hard of hearing or have a tummy ache. When their body chemestry is wrong or they are missing a vital mineral or vitamin. It's too darn easy to drug 'em into behaving and ignore the fact that there is a very high probablity that something else is wrong. We expect all kids to fit into this nice neat little package and get very upset with them when they won't comply. We insist that something must be wrong with their brains then pour medications into these same brains and say that we're treating their illness.

And it's the public schools that insist we fall in line.