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As a parent of a former child on the stuffnot any more and it was ashoke to them when they found out he had not been on it for over 8 months I have to say it was the school here in Tn. that pushed for it and after a few month as I found out that alot of kids were on it at that school so not only are parents pushing it but teachers as well I was a boy scout leader and had 20 boys in my troop and 18 of them was on it .so what does that say ? that alot of boys who do cubscouts need it . I dont think so . Every one I spoke with had a tale that started with teachers . so some one needs to look at all the people who are involved .

The entire Ritalin syndrome in my opinion has a much deeper root than people imagine. Why so many kids need some chemical. I have a difficult time to imagine that it is all not needed at all. Maybe the percentage is questionable, but as the entire phenomenon.........it must have a real cause.

And I think it does have a real cause. It goes back (in my subjective opinion) to the changed child raising practices. For tens of thousands of years, if a child did something wrong, undesirable, the parents spanked him/her. Did anyone think through, WHY?

I attempted to think beyond the seemingly obvious and I found an explanation which is different from the "mankind was always brutal, so they even beat their own children".
How do we teach things to our own children? By telling them things. Yes, but what happens at the age, when spoken words have no effects yet? Human children are born with thousands of different instincts which have biological origins. Take the instinct of fight for example. Who hasn't seen a two years old angrily beating her mother's chest while being held, because he doesn't like something? Did the kid LEARN that? Of course not. It is an instinct. And many other behavioral manifestations are instincts.

If an instinct is undesirable at a human-adult level, mankind attempts to change the manifestation of such instinct. For example, we teach our children not to urinate wherever the urge comes, but wait until they find an appropriate "facility" and do it there. But what happens, if the child is unable to comprehend a verbal instruction? Well......for thousands of years mankind did the "second best thing", it linked the inappropriate behavior with an unpleasant feedback, such as a mildly painful experience, such as a slap on the butt. Like the famous Pavlov's dog conditional reflex.

During the second half of the 20th century, mankind erroneously started to believe that hitting children is fundamentally wrong, failing to identify the real reasons behind such practice. No negative feedback leads to no control of the given instinct. Which is mildly "cute" when a child is two years old, but very far from cute later, instead it is socially disruptive and most of them oppose the typical practice of the intelligent human behavior.

Yet, this became the practice. Children's typical and known instinctual behaviors are not opposed these days in any way. By the time intelligent communication becomes possible, it is "too late", those instinctual behaviors are "stuck". Hence ADHD, a totally new "illness" which is the product of the 20th century. Back in the old days they were "bad children", but it was not a general phenomenon, that a certain significant percentage of children are simply not controllable later on in life. So much so, that it now takes chemicals to do so. In my opinion that is the real reason.

Gabor