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We
were recently featured on Good
Morning America
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Are We Drugging Our
Children to Fit “Rat Race” Demands?
by Christine Durst
& Michael Haaren
We were alarmed and
saddened at a recent report that up to 25% of children in
summer camps across the US are on drugs for “behavioral issues” – “mood
disorders,” “ADD / ADHD,” and assorted similar maladies.
Could it be that our
Rat Race lifestyles have something to do with this?
When suburban sprawl
and overcrowding create schools, highways, and other
environments in which “end-user management” becomes the dominant
concern,
where, as a society, are we really headed?
Similarly, are
parents falling into the same mindset, where “managing” their
children (to fit into the parents’ time-starved, “things-driven”
lifestyle)
takes precedence over guiding, loving, and understanding them?
In this unfolding
world, it seems that creative and entrepreneurial children –
what should be a redundant concept – are less and less desirable, and
more and
more “inconvenient.” Obedience, conformism, and malleable or
subservient
personalities are approved and rewarded, and the rebels and
“freethinkers” in
the crowd invite mischaracterization, chastisement, and social
exclusion.
Certainly, this is
not to approve of unconscionable behavior, or to deny that
some children have physiological or psychological issues that need to
be
addressed. However, we’re given pause when we read about the growing
drugging
of children, then come upon such books as Dreamers,
Discoverers & Dynamos: How to Help the Child Who Is Bright, Bored
and Having Problems in School (Formerly Titled 'The Edison Trait'), by psychologist
Lucy Jo Palladino.
Dr. Palladino (whose
book is out of print, but available second-hand at Amazon)
speaks of the one-in-five children – like Thomas Edison, who flunked
out of
school twice – who think “divergently,” and often have trouble in
school and in
organized environments and routines generally. These are what she calls
the Dreamers,
Discoverers, and Dynamos among us, whose “inconvenient” personalities
will come
up with a cure for cancer, or a Beethoven’s Ninth, or a book that sheds
light
where there was darkness before.
Other prominent child
therapists share Dr. Palladino’s concern. Child
psychiatrist Elizabeth J. Roberts, for example, author of Should
You Medicate Your Child's Mind? :A Child Psychiatrist Makes Sense of
Whether or Not to Give Kids Meds, condemns what she
calls an “unrestrained
frenzy to place children on psychiatric medications.”
Reading
about this “unbelievable explosion” (Dr. Roberts’ phrase) in drugging
our
young, we can’t help but wonder where this epidemic in “unmanageable
children”
comes from. Is it because parents aren’t properly disciplining their
kids, or
is the cause perhaps more fundamental?
In a society where
high-debt living and shrinking purchasing
power require two-career households, where lengthening commutes and
workweeks
preempt precious family time and leave us too tired to care, where out
of a
lack of corporate or governmental support for “parental leave” our
young are
institutionalized almost from birth, and remain institutionalized for
decades,
is it any wonder that our children are showing signs of
“unmanageability”?
When our own lives
have become unmanageable (if not frankly
chaotic), why shouldn’t we expect our children to react to it, and
become
“unmanageable,” too?
Prescriptions can be
a fine thing. But maybe the
prescription that’s needed isn’t the one the doctors are writing, but
one we
should be writing ourselves.
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Rat Race Factoids
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Work
From Home Scams
There
is a 42-to-1 scam ratio among "work from home" ads on the Internet, and
that is not counting the ones that arrive as spam in your inbox. [Read
our press release on this statistic.]
Average
Annual Vacation Days by Country:
United
States...........13
Japan...............25
Canada...............26
Great
Britain............28
Brazil..............34
Germany...............35
France................37
Italy.................42
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