Posted on 10/18/2013 4:11:28 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
All the employees of school districts on a witch hunt to expel and otherwise permanently punish young boys for shooting toy guns or forming their fists into the shape of a gun need to read Back to Normal.
The purpose of psychologist Enrico Gnaulati’s 2013 book is to argue how ordinary childhood behavior is often misdiagnosed as ADD, ADHD, depression and autism — frequently with life-long, disturbing consequences. But along the way he raises the taboo question of whether we “label boys as mentally unstable, behaviorally unmanageable, academically underachieving, in need of special-education services, or displaying behavior warranting school suspension just because their behavior deviates noticeably from that of the average girl?”
He adds, “In a sense, girl behavior has become the standard by which we judge all kids.”
He cites numerous studies showing that typical boy behavior – wrestling, rough games of tag, good guy/bad guy imaginative play that involves “shooting” — are condemned by preschool and elementary school teachers, the vast majority of whom are women, without the behavior being redirected appropriately to release boys’ “natural aggression............
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
No he can’t. He will watch a movie on his iPad while jumping up and down, and frequently running around the room.
We are very big on physical activity. In fact, we have a weight room and our kids are in there with us every day. Outdoor play is a necessity. I’ve even put them in thier bathing suits on warm, rainy days to let them run around in the mud. Luckily all of our neighbors are my parents age so they just laugh when i strip them down and hose them off. For most peopel, when we study we remember best the first and last 5-10 minutes. If the average person studies history for an hour there is anywhere from 40-50 minutes of wasted time. I use this strategy frequently: If we’re doing schoolwork we can’t do one subject for very long. But for an hour I can bounce back and forth from one subject to another. Because he only spends about 10 minutes per subject at one time, he retains every little morsel of knowledge and I don’t have to review with him before coming back to a subject. It’s frustrating and amazing at the same time to see how his brain works.
LOL! I was a lab assistant for a chemistry class my senior year. While experimenting, I mixed a couple of chemicals that created a large cloud of vapor/smoke, prompting the teacher to exclaim, "Balls of fire, man! What are you doing back there???"
He thought it was pretty funny, and encouraged my inquisitiveness.
Today, there's no doubt I would be on the next bus to the alternative school.
When my son was four, the kindergarten pre-screener in my town tried to tell me he had ADHD. He was a very active boy, big for his age, and loved to rough house and play with his friends.
I never told my wife about it (she didn’t attend the screening) but I told the screener, to say it politely, that she was in error and I was taking my son home without any kind of referral to a doctor or anyone else.
The boy is now a committed Christian, an Eagle Scout and a soldier in the United States Army and is one of the most magnificent young men I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. And he was just being a BOY at the time.
You are quite right. A large percentage of these diagnoses are just flat out wrong.
A father is also a great civilizing influence on a boy, but in a much different way than a mother. A talk which my Dad had with me around puberty was passed on to my daughters at about the same time:
"God gave a young man enough blood circulation to supply either his brain or his dick, but never both at the same time. Until you are with the person you are married to and intend to spend the rest of your life with, quickly get yourself out of any situation where the brain is shutting down before it completely shuts off."
My son was ADHD but I only have two kids and I was around enough to keep him busy. No medication.
Incidentally, my father retired from the Navy when I was ten.
Your relaives are nicer than some of mine. My cousin told me I wasn’t spanking my son hard enough.
My Grandpa told my Mom she was not spanking me enough. Needless to say, when my Grandpa was around I was better behaved. My Grandpa was 5’ 2” but he scared the heck out of me.
To this day, I'm still very good at independent projects and still very poor at music skills as a result.
A few years ago, my wife and I were unofficial foster parents for a family of six kids which included one ADHD diagnosed boy who accounted for over 90% of the problems we had with those kids. One particular trying day, I was trying to get the kid to take some responsibility for his actions and he blurted out "I have ADHD and you're going to have to learn to deal with it!"
"No", I said, "it is your problem, not mine and you're going to have to learn to deal with it! The world is a cruel place and if you act like that around people who don't care about you, the consequences are going to be far more severe than when you do it around people who actually care."
The kid was more shocked than he would've been than if I had slapped him hard. Nobody had ever told him that before. From then on, his outbursts became far less frequent.
BTW, as a former ADHD, dyslexic, kid who scored high on the intelligence test they would give me I love Calvin and Hobbes. I can relate to it.
That’s some good parenting. Congratulations!
But maybe the experience of successfully raising three of our owned helped. One would like to think so.
You sound like a great mom!
Queer is the new normal; boyish behavior is now verboten!
was respectful behavior required by the nuns?...yes sirree...
did that make them into zombies?....absolutely not!
perhaps todays' "boys" are different and what I suspect is the extraordinary amount of TV and video games that parents allow...
boys come home and do they go outside to play ball?...climb trees?...beat up on one another?...no....they go home, see daddy's porn collection on the table, and get on the computer to do the same, and then play violent video games for their "exercize"...
stop blaming the schools.....they have enough or the blame in many ways.....its up to the parents to get their boys to be outside doing physical work/play....THAT'S where boys expend their energy, at least it was in the good old days...
High school baseball coach. Paid absolutely squat, although I did get a new glove and a fungo bat. When the kids asked me questions (mostly about my Vietnam service which absolutely fascinated them) I always gave them solid conservative answers.
‘Best job I ever had. God willing I may do it again when we go SC or bust.
It's evil.
Good for you!! Glad to hear your young man turned out so well. That is the left’s fear. We will rear our children and not turn out little automatons to march to their beat. The left’s worst nightmare is an intelligent free thinking citizen capable of making up his own mind.
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