Drugging children because they're too active for the parent to handle imho is a sign of bad parenthood not a mentally ill child. Children should be taught discipline and put into place by physical force if needed be. They also should be given ample opportunity to spend the energy, take the children to martial arts classes, dances, give them bikes and take them to hikes, don't give them sugary foods and don't let them sit by the tv or a computer for more than two hours a day or so. Nobody can be active if one doesn't have the energy to be active, so put their energy into a productive cause like sports, community work or something else, not irresponsibly drug them down with medication, alter their brains and look at all that spare energy turning into fat causing other health problems.
you ahve no idea what it is like for perants with and ADD/ADHD child/ren, they're behaviour is extreem, and sometimes harmful to themselves, and when they are harming themselves because of what they are doing somtimes slapping a child doesnt work!! it is NOT down to bad parenting!! do you ahve kids?
I have no kids, but I teach martial arts to kids as young as 5 years old. Sometimes you have to be cruel, but it results in strong characters and mature minds. Nothing can spend more energy than one has, it's simple physics. These children have to be productively exhausted and organised in such a lifestyle that they don't have any energy left for tantrums and protests.
when a child has a typical ADD/ADHD fit it cause pain in the head, when a 4yr old picks up a wide screen tv and smashes it...thats normal? when a child runs up to someone in the supermarket and bites them...thats normal??? when a child slaps every child at school.....thats normal? when a child cant concentrate for more that 2mins thats .....normal??
You are wrong and you are right. There are children with true problems and there are kids (or parents) who like to abuse the system. In my day, all high school kids were depressed and we all played with prozac. Today, college students like to grab some prescriptions against ADHD symptoms to help them concentrate in studying for exams. But, really, when you see a kid with Autism or ADHD who isn't faking anything, you'll know the kid is not merely being naughty. Psychology got its birth with Sigmund Freud and psychiatry appeared much, much later. It is only natural that in grandparents' day nobody knew of Autism or how to deal with it correctly. But it doesn't mean that such illnesses never existed. Even in classic literature of previous centuries you can at times see a mention of a "stupid" person, which really means a person with inborn mental defects (whatever those defects were). It's as if you were saying HIV and AIDS didn't exist until last century.
Yes, I remember that. And Ritalin. Everyone was on something. But depression has been wrtten about in literature and so on. Mental illness as a whole has been recognized since humans have been keeping records. Now ADD or ADHD? That's a bit new, probably because there was no social reason for it to exist. Everyone worked, stayed busy, and you wouldn't recognize someone with "concentration problems" that well. They didn't, the virus is a relative newcomer.
No, not normal. Teach them that if they do such a thing the retaliation would be severe. Somehow I don't remember and also my parents or grandmother (my grandmother was a teacher) doesn't remember such behaviour, so it must be something to do with your modern and unhealthy lifestyles that causes the children to malfunction. Yes, there were a few cases, they were called "hard to foster children", but they always came from families where the parents were alcoholics or didn't pay any attention to their children or allowed them too much freedom to do what they wish. They then were taken away from such parents and put into special schools where professional educators treated and educated them. So do you spend too little time with your child? Do you allow your child too much freedom? Do you or your husband have problems with drugs or alcohol? Young children are like made from clay, they have to be shaped into social beings, they have to be made into humans. If left on their own they remain little animals.
Everyone's still pretty busy. We're talking about kids who can't concentrate on one task - which means they do have a task to complete and there's another task waiting for them. Back in the day, there were just lazy fools in the same category with retards and midgets. Dyslexia was probably never recognized as a malfunction until recently because we never bothered with kids who did poorly at spelling, we simply beat those kids with a ruler. Same happened to lefties (still happens in some schools) - there were no "lefties," there were kids who wouldn't use the right hand and who were slapped for it. And because nobody bothered with genetics back in the day, there were plenty of people with birth defects going around; nobody thought it was abnormal, it was merely unpleasant. It's getting late. I meant to allude to the whole AIDS rejection. There's a group of smart asses who believe that AIDS is a myth, a government conspiracy, or whatever.
I don't think that drugging children with chemicals that mess with their brains is an answer to breed a healthy generation. Work with them, educate them differently, even be cruel when they are unsubordinate and lack discipline, but don't make them into junkies at the age of 7.
You've never encountered kids with disabilities. I don't know where Latvia keeps them but in U.S. they attend classes with normal children and the difference is obvious. Look up effects of alcoholism in pregnant women, you'll see just why those kids were so hard to foster. That's a dumb statement. Your brain is affected by the chemicals that make up your food and your air. Your brain is affected by the amount of sleep you get. Your brain is affected by chemicals that make up your prescriptions and your headache pills. What "messes with the brain"?
I have a few. Unfortunately their weak willed parents pulled them out of training because they complained too much. Oh, I agree, but there is a difference between cocain and peppermint tea. p.s. Headache pills work on the bloodflow and enlarge the blood vessels in the head to ease stress, not affect brain tissue.
Oh, and there is a difference between then and now. Why are there now so many cases of these ADHD (sp) children these days? I agree that there are always a few cases where the children are truly mentally ill, genetical and birth defects, but not on the mass scale like now. They are simply not educated properly by their parents when small.
Hmm, that's a good point. Maybe they're still lazy fools, though. People realized the abnormalities - they simply didn't explain it by saying that it was a genetic or medical defect. Yeahhhh.....I don't think so. Avatar: I apologize if I read you wrong, but you seem to want children to act as submissively as the advocates of drugging do. So much of this problem is due to the fact that we expect children to act in a fairly unnatural way - sit down for a long time, obey arbitrary rules and respect people who haven't earned it, and in general act like dolls rather than people. Very true, but then - up till about 300 years ago we thought that scitzophrenics were holy or possessed. There are more scizophrenics now because we call them scitzophrenics now.
No, I don't want children to be dolls of the grown ups, I want them to know their rights and be not abused. But I also want them to treat people who have acomplished something in life with respect and politeness. Even if the grown up is an idiot, you don't have to spit in his face and call him an old fool or smash his tv-set, you can simply walk away and let him remain in his ignorance. But the thing that is happening these days when children are allowed to call their teachers names and even hit them without fear of retaliation is wrong, a fault and an abuse of the educational system. Same thing when youngsters are ridiculing over old and incapable people. It's disgusting. If I get such a case in my martial arts class... No need for details.
My mother and grandmother are not 300 years old and they are well capable of learning new concepts and knowledge, and compare experience and particular cases, my mother more than my grandmother of course.
I agree. I see it in people my age, not just children. They think that they're entitled to respect and to "good things." Nobody works for them. Here's an example: we have big bottles of spring water where I work. When you empty them to take the water, making tea or whatever, you can simply put another bottle of water on the dispenser. So I'm sitting there, making a tea, some girl walks in, takes the rest of the water, and walks off. "You could refill that, you know" "Oh, I couldn't lift one of those! Someone else will!" I think that is the problem.
That they can notice that there are more cases of these ADHD (sp) children now than were children in the past even if they were not called by that specific name.
I knew this kid... he was about seven years old. He would throw tantrums, break things, call female staffers bitch, and need to be physically restrained. He was a victim of very severe and repetitive abuse- and this was the way he was expressing and reinacting his abuse. Hitting that child would not have helped. The idea that physical violence should be used in the face of physical violence is ludacris. Yes, if a child is violently lashing out you have to physically restrain that child, but you do not spank, hit, or beat that child. My 2 year old baby brother understands that if he does something bad (ie: bite someone, take a toy from his brother, jump off a table) he'll get a toy taken away and have to stand in time out- and he hates that form of discipline more than he'd ever hate a spanking (my mom has spanked him and it always ends poorly). It usually takes me giving him one time out to break an especially severe attack of the "bite Dora". Physical discipline may be fine for some kids, but children who have special needs or whose parents act out in anger almost always end up more screwed up in the end. Behavioral therapy in many cases can be as effective as ritalin for ADHD children. Behavioral therapy is also very expensive (400 to 1,000 dollars a month for many, many months- sometimes even years). Ritalin can also make a world of difference for a kid. I was working with this girl who could not focus on any task for more than five minutes and needed CONSTANT redirection. She'd get frustrated because she couldn't complete a project. She was recieving therapeutic interventions and in special ed (I was the assitant for her art class, my focus was usually divided between her and violent fits boy). Anyway, when she went on meds it was a night and day difference. All of a sudden she could complete projects. And no, she did not turn into a robot, and she could still be very difficult. You guys are talking about a spectrum of children. There are some kids with real ADHD and they need real interventions addressed at their ADHD. There are other kids who are either traumatised or victims of neglect and need equally intensive interventions focused on those issues. Yes, some parents are well intentioned and bad at being parents, however I firmly believe that this cannot explain 99% of all ADHD-like disorders.
