behavior didn’t improve, hinting that, legally, he did not need my permission to paddle him.
Gray continued to have problems in school, and needed a lot of support from the teachers, his father, and me to complete school projects. Yet his grades were good. In Pre-reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science, and Art he got straight E’s throughout the year. Under “Personal and Social Development,” however, he got an X (the equivalent of an F) in “follows directions,” “completes assigned tasks,” “works well with others,” and “exhibits self-control.” He got an X in “makes good use of time.”
Eventually, I caved. I caved to the pressure from the school, the doctors, and Gray’s father, and I agreed to put Gray on Ritalin when he turned seven.
As far as I know, the principal never beat him again.
Gray would remain on Ritalin or some substitute—in later years it was Adderall—for at least twelve years, during which period he continued to have problems with friendships, his grades deteriorated, and he developed more strongly defiant behavior at school. In high school, he was suspended several times for his insolence toward the teachers, and he was arrested a few times for minor offenses. Eventually, he stopped going to classes and had to go to court on several occasions for truancy. He dropped out of high school at sixteen, still taking psycho-stimulants. Although he managed to get a GED and make it through half a semester of college with Adderall, he began to abuse that drug, as many do, and I wound up having to commit him for drug abuse when he was nineteen. In later years, he would convince doctors to give him other versions of stimulants such as Concerta, Focalin, and Vyvanse. He would graduate to meth and even heroin. At this writing, he has just completed thirty days of rehab.
I don’t know how much effect the years of taking stimulants will ultimately have on Gray’s life. It was moderately useful in the early years, ineffective in the teen years, and overall, does not appear to have had the promised positive effects. I sometimes fear that his natural impulsivity, creativity, and spontaneity were squelched during those years he was on stimulants, and maybe those years of squelching contributed to the strong feelings in him that are sometimes manifested as anger. It’s as if the drug managed to hold back those waters for a time, but now all the floodgates are open, and all hell has burst loose.
All the things the principal and ADD literature claimed would be the consequences of not putting Gray on Ritalin—school failure such that he would eventually drop out, depression, conduct disorder, failed relationships, under-achievement in the workplace, and substance abuse—have occurred anyway, despite the use of stimulants. I asked him recently about his use of drugs and alcohol to control his moods, and he said that he learned as a child that the way the culture wanted him to control his moods was with a pill, so he never learned to develop the life skills he needed to manage his emotions.
Gray still struggles with the same issues he struggled with in kindergarten. And yet. My son is one of the smartest persons I have ever known. He has more natural intelligence than many of my PhD-educated colleagues. He is a talented musician, poet, and social critic. He is witty and has a great sense of humor. But he is a failure in the eyes of American society.
Life is messy. I’ve focused exclusively on one thread of that mess here: the negative effects of a broken school system. Of course, other crucial strands, both environmental and cultural, affected Gray’s life. Kids like Gray often have behavior problems that have little to do with those behavior clusters psychologists label as ADD. Genes and culture figure into the mix, parenting styles as well as the style of authority and learning in the schools.
Perhaps most importantly, though, schools have failed to understand how radically different this generation is from those that preceded it, and how the popular American culture that bred and nurtured Gray’s generation had a tremendous influence on their ability to attend as well as their capacity for defiance.
Gray’s generation, often called Millennials, was the first generation to be inundated with a fast-moving popular culture—including video games, MTV, and web surfing—that created and then nurtured a kind of aesthetics of movement. Popular media breastfed these kids on montage, breakneck speed images, and fractured narratives. Most experienced changing landscapes in more personal ways as well, as a large percent of them came from single parent families where partners came and went, and actual physical movement, from house to house if not from state to state, was the norm. This was certainly the case with Gray. I left his father when he was eighteen months old, and we moved every few years after that in search of a better job or neighborhood.
Gray’s was the first generation whose defining features, specifically their short attention span, lack of respect for authority, and seeming lack of ambition were pathologized. If we accept that Attention Deficit Disorder is in fact a disorder, Gray’s generation was the one to which it was first applied almost wholesale, as was the practice of using stimulants to control it. Our attitude has been to punish or drug the kids, and to demonize rather than try to understand the culture that influences them.
Once a diagnosis of ADD is made of a child, that label tends to dominate how we see that child. No longer do we see a child with a cultural and personal history, a child (and parents) caught in a struggle with a sometimes idiotic school system over which all may feel powerless, a bright, quick, heartbreakingly insightful and imaginative child; we see a child with ADD. The label functions as a pair of sunglasses we put on whenever we look at our child, glasses that mute the brightness, shade the subtle but important colors. In that respect, Gray’s nightmare about the magic diamond that makes kids look ugly is quite appropriate.
The most striking common denominators of ADD children are their painful difficulties in our public-school system and the profound failure of the schools to find a way to embrace and nurture these children. The way Gray’s school chose to deal with him is typical of what we still find in many American schools: drug or punish. And though there are, as I’ve noted, many issues, both cultural and genetic, that we need to consider when thinking about these children, it is the issue of schooling over which we have most power, as a culture, to affect. We can’t change genes, we can’t always change popular culture, we can’t always change the way a parent interacts with a child. We can, however, change the way our public schools treat children.
The medical profession has as its motto do no harm, and this is the very least we can ask of our school system. Gray has come of age in a world of perhaps unparalleled violence and aggression. Is it surprising that a nation that still allows its children to be beaten in schools produces soldiers who can perform the kinds of physical abuse of international prisoners we have witnessed in the media over the last few years? It can also come as no surprise that, in 2014, one in three students claim to have been bullied at school, and that the rise in other school-related violence, including the recent widely publicized school shootings, has reached an obscene level.
Grays’ principal was practicing, on a small scale, the principles of terrorism. Even though the principal believed my son had a disorder that did not allow him to attend, despite his belief that my son needed medication to “behave,” he still beat him, just as we still execute death-row prisoners who are demonstrably mentally ill. The principal, by his own admission, wanted to instill terror in my son’s heart. It didn’t work, although it succeeded in wounding him, possibly, I worry, for the rest of his life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, cautions those of us who fight monsters to take care that we not become monsters ourselves. Let’s begin by shining our magic diamonds such that we do not see our children as monsters. Let’s at least consider that through gross neglect, our schools may have become torture chambers for some of our children. Let’s stop relying on drugs and punishment as the major tools in our toolboxes to deal with these children.
Let’s do something radical: let’s work on understanding generations so wondrously strange and challenging. I am only one mother writing
