St. Germain, not Gideon,” I said. “And you know this after one week with my son?”
He gave me a patronizing look and proceeded to explain. He noted not only Gray’s fidgetiness and inability to sit still, but that he had trouble getting started on projects and trouble finishing them. He seemed to be “out in space” somewhere when the teacher gave orders or assignments. He couldn’t remember much of anything, his teacher Mrs. Merkin had said. Whenever he had to go somewhere, whether it was to the bathroom or outside for recess, he ran. Sometimes, the principal said, he even ran in the classroom from one side to the other. These, he said, were symptoms of ADD1 children—restlessness, hyper-activity, inability to concentrate for long periods of time, and so on. He told me he had written his dissertation on ADD, which was why he could recognize it so quickly. ADD children, if not treated, he said, tended to fall behind and become under-achievers. Some of them, he said, never finished school and had trouble making friends all of their lives.
“Mrs. Merkin has had to send Gray in here to talk with me every day because he won’t sit still and can’t pay attention. He’s distracting the other students and interfering with their ability to learn.”
“Every day?”
“Every day. And this can’t go on.”
“But this is just kindergarten. It’s the first time he’s had to sit still. Why can’t the teacher handle this herself?”
“Kindergarten is an important time for children, Mrs. Gideon. It prepares them for the challenges ahead. The teacher can’t take so much time on one child. It’s better to nip this in the bud now.”
I left his office furious. Of course I knew about ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder); I’d read articles in the newspapers and magazines about how it was being over-diagnosed in young children, mostly boys, and how Ritalin was a stimulant often used treat it. ADD was associated with hyperactivity, but its major symptoms were inattention and impulsivity. Tears sprung, unbidden. I didn’t want to drug Gray. The thought of it made me ill, but I wondered what would happen if we fought the principal’s recommendation. I felt thrust into a harsh world I didn’t understand, and for the first time in my life, I had no clue what the right path might be. It seemed to me that, once taken, the path of drugs would be one from which it would be hard to turn back.
Psychostimulants were first administered to children in 1937, although the first FDA-approved use of Ritalin (methylphenidate) for children was in 1961. Methylphenidate, classified in the same category as cocaine and methamphetamine, is a stimulant some doctors argue is addicting. For years, it has been abused on the streets, sometimes crushed and snorted, other times injected. Like cocaine, it’s a powerful, mind-altering drug. During the 1990’s, the use of Ritalin or other stimulants to control children’s behavior increased more than seven hundred percent in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the number of children on medication for ADD has risen from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2014.
Retired deputy assistant administrator of the DEA Gene Haislip commented that America has become the only country in the world whose children are prescribed such a vast quantity of stimulants that share the same properties as cocaine. The United States uses about eighty-five percent of the world’s Ritalin.
When I thought of Gray, I thought of exuberance, ebullience. His face was always radiant with emotion, and he was literally filled with energy, curiosity and enthusiasm for everything. Tickled by some event or other, he would sometimes throw his body recklessly through the air and onto his bed, ripped through with laughter. He would be unaware of the room, or of me, only attentive to the absurd thing that had made him laugh, and the hole of laughter into which he’d fallen. He was so animated, so full of ideas and questions, and already adamant in his opinions. What would this child be like on Ritalin?
I thought of Where the Wild Things Are, the Caldecott Medal-winning book by Maurice Sendak, which I read to Gray probably once a week. Everything about the protagonist, Max, the child in wolf’s clothing—his truculent and defiant nature, his “wildness,” his imagination, his restless body and spirit—reminded me of Gray. What kind of culture did I live in, where the same qualities that were admired and celebrated in a book were labeled as a disorder in the schools?
I could feel myself becoming stubborn, digging in against the principal’s recommendation, though I had little but intuition to support my yet unshaped feelings. It did seem, however, that drugs should be the last recourse, not the first. The accusation that Gray was inattentive baffled me; he had never been inattentive at home. He loved being read to, and he paid attention even when the books we read were long and didn’t have many pictures. He loved playing with his toys, certainly showing great attention there. True, I sometimes had to tell him several times to do something, and he was occasionally defiant, but that seemed to me healthy, a sort of testing of boundaries and limits that needn’t be pathologized. I was angry, though I couldn’t say at whom or what.
The way Ritalin was explained to parents in those days was a little like the way God is explained to young children: it’s a mystery in which you must have faith. Ritalin, doctors told us, was a stimulant that, on children, had the opposite effect. It somehow calmed them down instead of speeding them up. I could not wrap my head around the paradox that a stimulant could act as a sedative. We now know that Ritalin does not have a paradoxical effect on children; it affects them exactly as it affects adults, as a stimulant. Like methadone, it provides a substitute “high”; the stimulation is drug-produced so that kids don’t search for stimulation in the real world. According to Lawrence Diller, author of Running on Ritalin, what observers mistake for calm is intensified focus.
We weren’t doing our jobs as parents, the principal said, if we didn’t put Gray on Ritalin. In subsequent conversations, the principal continually emphasized that the consequences of not putting Gray on Ritalin were school failure such that he would eventually drop out, depression, conduct disorder, failed relationships, underachievement in the workplace, and substance abuse.
I decided, however, to resist the principal’s suggestion that we put Gray on Ritalin. I came from a family that had a history of substance abuse, and I did not wish to set my son on the road to drug use as a way to control his behavior. I had escaped the fate of many in my family, and would do everything in my power to help my son escape. Sanctioned or not, Ritalin had the same effects as cocaine, effects I knew well.
Before I left the principal’s office, I informed him I’d consider what he had said, but that either way I was going to sit in on Gray’s class. I also called Gray’s father and explained to him what the principal had said. We had a long conversation in which we agreed to try to make the environments at each house more similar, to have the same rules, the same consequences for breaking the rules, and make sure he was eating balanced meals at regular intervals at both homes. Consistency, we decided, was key.
I attended Gray’s kindergarten class the following Tuesday. I wanted Mrs. Merkin to forget I was there, so I brought some papers to grade, and since I myself didn’t teach on Tuesdays, I settled in for the whole day.
Mrs. Merkin was in her mid-twenties and could not have been teaching for very long. The class was large, with almost thirty students, and she clearly did not have the skills to manage such a crowded class. During the morning period, she constantly sent children—always boys—to the principal’s office, sometimes for minor infractions. Gray did not get into trouble that day (he was acutely aware that I was there), but I watched with interest as one little boy who, during a long period of coloring, decided to finish coloring standing up, was dressed down by Mrs. Merkin. She insisted he sit down to finish the coloring. Each time she turned around, he stood up again, still coloring, but standing and bending over the table. She’d run back to the table, order him to sit down, and the cycle
