According to the Washington Post, 10% percent of 10-year-old American boys are on Ritalin or similar drugs. From my experience as a teacher I can tell you that there are some kids for whom the drugs are useful--I've seen it firsthand. On the other hand, for most boys it is useless and counterproductive.

I've long campaigned against these drugs, and it seems that every time I discuss this problem on a radio show some aggrieved mother or father calls up and tells me that the school wants him or her to put their kindergarten or first grade son on Ritalin. It's an outrage. The problem is not our boys--the problem is that our schools refuse to adapt and accommodate boys' educational needs and learning styles. In my column The 'Boy Parent Dilemma' (Los Angeles Daily News, 9/6/02) I explained:

"Modern schools are not suited to boys' personalities and learning styles. This can be seen from the time boys enter school, when many of them are immediately branded as behavior problems. The line of 10 kids who had to gather every day after school in my son's first grade class for their behavior reports--all boys. The names of kids on the side of the chalkboard who misbehaved and would lose recess--all boys. The kids as young as five or six who must be drugged so they will sit still and 'behave'--almost all boys...

"This afternoon, millions of us will pick our little sons up from school and hope to hear that it was a good day. Yet many of our boys will have spent much of the day being scolded and punished, often for doing nothing more than being boys. And with each of these mistreated little boys--waving their arms and running toward us across the yard, happy to be away from that place where everything feels so unnatural and they somehow always seem to be doing something wrong--comes the boy parent dilemma."

According to this recent Reuters article, "Children from broken marriages are twice as likely to be prescribed attention-deficit drugs as children whose parents stay together." I don't believe there's one easy answer to explain this phenomenon, but it's interesting that nobody in the article sees the most obvious possibility--the kids (largely boys) have in most cases had their fathers removed from their regular lives.

Kids twice as likely to get Ritalin after divorce
(June 4, 2007)

TORONTO - Children from broken marriages are twice as likely to be prescribed attention-deficit drugs as children whose parents stay together, a Canadian researcher said on Monday, and she said the reasons should be investigated.

More than 6 percent of 633 children from divorced families were prescribed Ritalin, compared with 3.3 percent of children whose parents stayed together, University of Alberta professor Lisa Strohschein reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The study of more than 4,700 children started in 1994, while all the families were intact, Strohschein said. They followed the children’s progress to see what happened to their families and to see what drugs were prescribed.

“It shows clearly that divorce is a risk factor for kids to be prescribed Ritalin,” Strohschein said.

Other studies have shown that children of single parents are more likely to get prescribed drugs such as Ritalin. But is the problem caused by being born to a never-married mother, or some other factor?

“So the question was, ‘is it possible that divorce acts a stressful life event that creates adjustment problems for children, which might increase acting out behavior, leading to a prescription for Ritalin?”’ Strohschein said in a statement.

“On the other hand, there is also the very public perception that divorce is always bad for kids and so when children of divorce come to the attention of the health-care system — possibly because parents anticipate their child must be going through adjustment problems — doctors may be more likely to diagnose a problem and prescribe Ritalin.”

Commonly prescribed Ritalin, known generically as methylphenidate, is a psychostimulant drug most commonly prescribed for the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.

There is a big debate in much of the developed world over whether it may be over-prescribed — given to children who do not really need it. In March, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the use of drugs to treat ADHD has more than tripled worldwide since 1993.

Strohschein said it is possible that some mental health problems pre-date the divorce, so “it is possible that these kids had these problems before, but are only being identified afterward.”

Her study was not designed to find out why the children were prescribed the drug.

“I might be finished with the survey, but I am not necessarily finished with the question,” she said in a telephone interview.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Boys/Boy Crisis in Education/Schools, Children's Rights, Education. You can trackback from your own site.