Bad Therapy Step 6: Dispense Diagnoses Liberally
This one really irks me:
Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can't sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She'd like you to take him to be evaluated.
And so you do. It's a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what's wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be.
The crazy thing is, this is normal behavior for a 5-year old, especially boys who mature later than girls, and are just more hyperactive compared to girls. To turn him into a docile robot is to do injustice to him if you ask me, especially when you consider the side effects of these drugs because once you have ADHD, you will be medicated.
The classroom has goals to meet, and if kids are making the teacher lose progress because they’re just being normal, they have to be “taken care of.”
It’s like kindergarten mafia, expect you don’t get whacked, you get drugged.
I remember a similar situation reading “The Collapse of Parenting,” where the author (Dr. Leonard Sax), would be surprised by how often parents were trying to find a fix for their teenager with medication, when the problem was the teen had a TV in his room and unlimited access to video games, making him play through the night and consequentially, sleepy and inattentive at school. The medicine did make him more attentive, but he lost that “glint in his eye.” Essentially, what the parents were saying was he lost that thing that made him human.
Sometimes people do have real issues like dyslexia, but don’t go shopping for diagnoses till you get the answer you want. Sounds a lot like fatwa shopping.
But l've also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping-in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn't listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was "within normal range." But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child's recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
This one really irks me:
Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can't sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She'd like you to take him to be evaluated.
And so you do. It's a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what's wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be.
The crazy thing is, this is normal behavior for a 5-year old, especially boys who mature later than girls, and are just more hyperactive compared to girls. To turn him into a docile robot is to do injustice to him if you ask me, especially when you consider the side effects of these drugs because once you have ADHD, you will be medicated.
The classroom has goals to meet, and if kids are making the teacher lose progress because they’re just being normal, they have to be “taken care of.”
It’s like kindergarten mafia, expect you don’t get whacked, you get drugged.
I remember a similar situation reading “The Collapse of Parenting,” where the author (Dr. Leonard Sax), would be surprised by how often parents were trying to find a fix for their teenager with medication, when the problem was the teen had a TV in his room and unlimited access to video games, making him play through the night and consequentially, sleepy and inattentive at school. The medicine did make him more attentive, but he lost that “glint in his eye.” Essentially, what the parents were saying was he lost that thing that made him human.
Sometimes people do have real issues like dyslexia, but don’t go shopping for diagnoses till you get the answer you want. Sounds a lot like fatwa shopping.
But l've also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping-in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn't listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was "within normal range." But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child's recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagno-sis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up