Rescuing our kids, not popping pills into them

Good discipline is difficult for teachers and parents in a time in which there are so many warnings and things we must not do.

But kids need to be active - look at them in a playground, a preschool or on the street. Watch kids wriggle in strollers. I watch my grandkids raid the rubbish bin and attack cupboards. Activity is normal. We can't expect kids to "shut up, sit still, and listen" all day. That's what boys complain that they are told, far too often.

In about 1990 I attended a school camp. It was a middle and working-class state school in the western suburbs of Sydney. “Look at all this medication”, the Deputy said. “The kids are supposed to get this three times a day.” And he kicked the box of medication under the bed. The kids got none of it. They were busy and active all day and they were all fine all weekend. Kids aren’t made to sit still and be quiet.

Are your kids like this? Kids need to move, ask questions: “Why is the sky blue? Why do people wear pyjamas? Why do you go to work?” Don’t leave your precious children to the idiotic things on the “shut up” box in the lounge room. Kids should be out in the garden, helping Mum grow veggies, helping Dad mow the lawn. They learn by doing and are usually happy to help.

Western society is too fond of curing problems with pills. Compare Chinese medicine, which favours acupuncture and hands-on treatment for back pain, with the local GP who too often prescribes anti-inflammatories or aspirin for the same complaint. The drug companies promote their drugs and try to persuade us all to use more. Pills to wake up, pills to sleep better, pills for everything. We can’t solve all our problems by popping pills. Dosing children needlessly is bad for all of us. It teaches kids that pills solve our health problems.

The vast majority of children treated for ADHD seem to be boys. Of course! Boys tend to be more active. Look at a playground and look at the kids racing around, constantly moving. How many of them are boys? Most of them, I observe.

Behaviour issues in the home are much more difficult when there is no father living in the home. Having a father present, physically and emotionally, helps give boys especially a sense of purpose and belonging. Boys suffer more than girls after divorce for this reason, according to many sources, such as Sebastian Kraemer. But in our post-feminist world, nobody wants to hear that males have difficulties.

There are many implications in all this.

1. We can expect the drug companies, with all their worldwide resources, to fight this threat by every means they can.
    
2. Teachers will need much better preparation for assisting with the diagnosis of ADHD. To my knowledge, most teachers have no such knowledge. I taught teacher education for 40 years and I watched teacher preparation become more scanty every year as subject matter is sliced again and again.
    
3. Schools will need help with providing behaviour therapies. Schools will have to move to more active learning to cope with children who are inattentive. But we can’t retain male teachers in most schools past the age of about 35: they move up the promotion ladder or find a better paying job elsewhere. The ones that are left get wearier every year.
    
4. We know, too, that the federal government does not employ a single teacher or run a single school. Responsibility for state schools falls on State Education Departments, designed, in the case of darkest New South Wales, in 1880. Especially in the largest states, they are heavy, slow bureaucracies full of tired people who weary of the pace of change.

But somehow we must adapt the school to the boy, and not make the boy conform to school. The same goes for girls, whose problems can also be overlooked. Active approaches to learning are usually liked by girls as well as boys.

In sum then, Ms Roxon has done us all a service by bringing these matters to our attention. Let’s accept that kids are active. Let’s hesitate before popping pills in attempts to solve our problems. And let’s stop trying to make boys act like girls.