House of Eratosthenes

Momma has taken a front-and-center role in raising the boy, for whatever reason, and can’t relate to him because he’s male and she’s female. So she waltzes into the doc’s office and orders that he be put on medication. This is an impermissible doctor/patient relationship practice in all other fields of medicine, but with learning disabilities it’s okay! Onto the Ritalin-or-whatever he goes!

So we have an entire generation of boys strung out on drugs because their mommas want to be relating to them as if they’re little girls, and haven’t been able to do it. Wonderful.

Then along comes summer. What to do? Have a holiday from the drugs as well as from school? That has been a practice, evidently…but Newsweek wants to do something about that.

Sunscreen and stamps are a must, and granola bars are always appreciated. But when it comes to packing up their kids for camp, many parents are leaving the prescription drugs at home. For the 2.5 million kids medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), physicians recommend an occasional break from the meds. The freewheeling days of summer are in some ways the perfect time. But when sleepaway camp is in the cards, drug holidays can present a problem—not just to the counselors having to handle kids who can be off-the-wall, but often also to the campers themselves.

That’s right. We have to get rid of holidays from the “Don’t act so much like a boy so your momma can understand you as if you’re a little girl” drugs…while the boys are at camp. Camp. That’s where you go so you don’t have to deal with the static when your parents catch you using the F-word and the C-word and the D-word and the A-word. That’s what it was back in my day. A place where you were able to wallow in your male-ness, more than you could back at home. Spitting off that bridge just to see if you could hit the leaf floating in the creek. Swamping your buddy’s canoe just to see if you could do it. All the stuff little girls can’t understand.

Snips, snails and puppy-dog’s tails.

But now we have “ADHD medication.” So we’re gonna get rid of that now.

Sue Scheff, a parent advocate who has blogged about her son Scott’s ADHD, tried for years to send him to camp unmedicated. Every year it was the same: “Within a week’s time I’d get a call saying the claws are coming out, he’s misbehaving, and I’d have to send the medication up to get him on track.” So why keep trying? In part it was to give him relief from the side effects. But the bigger motivating factor, she says, was avoiding the stigma of the ADHD label—both for Scott, who was teased when he had to leave the lunchroom to take his pills, and for herself. “Maybe it was a selfish decision,” Scheff says. “I just wanted to take him off so I didn’t have to explain to everybody why he was on the medication.”

GEE! I’m a parent of a child who’s had his share of go-’rounds with the “learning disability industry” — ooh, did I say that out loud? — well, anyway. I’m a parent. I’m a blogger. I guess I’m just as qualified as this Sue Scheff person.

Not a single syllable about Scott Scheff’s father, or if he has one. So where are the rough-n-tumble male role models? Not at camp, evidently; “the claws are coming out,” so they place a call to momma to get some drugs. What kinds of claws are those? In the summer of ’78, it was turning each other’s aluminum canoes over. I still have some rocks in my left knee from that excursion — the day it happened, I bled like a stuck pig, and probably got something of an infection. Just good clean summer fun, we called it. I spent that night in excruciating agony, my knee swelling up to the size of a softball. Just a typical footnote in a typical once-a-summer week away at camp.

So is this boy sinking other kids’ canoes to get mailed his little baggy of drugs? Is that it? Or is it putting his dinner fork to the left of his salad fork in the mess hall?

We have a presidential candidate this year who says we need to stop setting our thermostats at seventy-two…learn to say Merci Beaucoup…(I’m a poet and I dunno it). You know what, Newsweek? Somehow, of all the other problems facing our nation — I think boys taking a break from their “stop being male” drugs for a week or two during the summer, and all the attendant consequences of the “drug holiday,” don’t exactly bubble up to the top of the stack of our pressing problems.

We do not suffer from a surplus of budding testosterone. We are being killed, slowly, by a generational extinction of it.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Move MOUNTAINS, if you have to, to keep fathers involved in the raising of their sons. Even if they are at first a little bit reluctant. Even if he’s a dick who won’t pay his child support without lots of prodding. Treat the scummy bio-dad as you would a movie villain — if he has so much as a shred of human decency in him, see if it’s possible to bring that out. Boys have an instinctive appetite to carry on a family line, consistent with their programming, and no stepfather is going to fill this appetite. Sorry if that’s a bitter pill to swallow but it’s true.

2. Treat moderate cases differently from extreme ones. Some kids are so hyperactive that there’s just no question, they’re borderline disabled. Other kids, you can have a back-and-forth debate all afternoon between parents & teachers about whether there’s anything wrong at all, with legitimate points to be made on both sides. Believe me. I’ve been there. These are different situations. Treat ’em that way.

3. Just Say No to drugs. There is huge profit to be made in them, which taints the ability of the parents to be able to rely on the counsel of “educators” and other supposed “professionals.” Use the Powell Doctrine — get in to get out. If there’s no exit strategy for the medication, then don’t start.

4. Mothers are not supposed to be able to relate to little boys any more intimately than fathers can relate to their little girls. Probably, if we understood the human programming down to the letter, reading it off some lost ancient scroll or something — we’d find boys are supposed to be even more of a mystery than that. If the problem is limited to the mother failing to establish absolute control over her little bubbins’ every move and absolute understanding of every little spark that fires between the synapses…and there are no other symptoms…drugs are unwarranted. This is not a disorder, it is what is called “forming a personality.”

5. Once treatment has started, a good litmus test for keeping the child on the treatment is “without it, he would be completely lost.” A bad litmus test is the more common one: “It’s done him so much good!” If that’s the test that is being applied, and nobody is raising a red flag about it, then everyone needs to be replaced.

6. A disability is not a disorder, and a disorder is not a disability.

7. Too many disorders can be defined as “somehow, I got it in my head the kid would do this thing, and instead he did that thing.” Why did he do that thing? Did you bother to ask him? Maybe you’re the oddball for getting the thought in your head that he’d do something else. Communicate with him. Find out what he’s trying to do, what his motives are. Remember, the child is here to help the next generation function in whatever what it’s going to have to — he isn’t here to do every li’l thing the way you thought he would. A trained animal can do that. This is a thinking human being. When he enters the world of adulthood, we want him to be exercising a sense of judgment…just like we ritually expect our girls to do when they become women. This, I postulate, is why you don’t very often hear about girls being placed on these drugs. We have been led down an errant path, in which we believe individual discretion to be a beneficial attribute in our newly-minted ladies, and a rancid toxin in our newest graduating classes of gentlemen.

Thing I Know #179. Children seem to be “diagnosed” with lots of things lately. It has become customary for at least one of their parents to be somehow “enthusiastic” about said diagnosis, sometimes even confessing to having requested or demanded the diagnosis. Said parent is invariably female. Said child is invariably male. The lopsided gender trend is curious, and so is the spectacle of parents ordering diagnoses for their children, like pizzas or textbooks.

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Medication HolidaysMonday, July 14th, 2008

Medication Holidays
Monday, July 14th, 2008