Muse – ADHD/ADD and Treatment

As an education major I’ve had to study behavioral, mental, emotional and physical disorders. I agree with you – I don’t think they should be medicating children that young – as all two year olds are full of so much energy and go from one thing to the next. Medicating them is not healthy. I dont think medication for ADD/HD should even be a concern until they are of school age and are unable to

sit in their chairs to the extent of their fellow peers. Anyway — thanks for bringing that article to attention.

Thanks for this article! We’re just starting to face some concerns of ADHD with my pre-school aged son right now, so this is very interesting.

an old friend of mine has ADD but never really took medication for it. He did in the beginning but then stoped and he’s never really had any “problems” since ive known him. And i agree with you about medicating children. Children shouldnt be on medication and if they do need to they need to be extra careful when prescribing.

Kids that young need attention. *shakes head* Maybe some could use it. But. How do we know they have a serious problem? How do we know those drugs won’t alter the kids developmental process? What if the body compenstates and makes the kid more hyperactive? The notion we can medicate our kids into submission sickens me.

These kids are stuffed with sugar and sweets, then they take away their outdoor recess privileges and are cooped up inside so no one is sued from a dodgeball game-gone-bad, teachers are afraid to yell at the kids for fear of a lawsuit… and we wonder why our kids are bouncing off the walls!

Sugar/processed foods, preservative, lack of exercise, lack of parenting and the overstimulation of television and video games (and I hate to say it and will probably be horrible flamed) kids in daycare from infancy all contribute to children bouncing off the walls. I think the TRUE ADD/HD cases are real.. but very rare. It scares me to think what the long term consequences of drugging our

children will be… It’s a shame that something that is beneficial to a true case of ADD/HD is prescribed for many normal behaviors kids how nowadays..

Until we have a real science of human mental functioning, we should follow past practice 100%. These drug experiments with out youth will result in a generation, a whole generation of adults without natural self-control abilities. That is frightening.

It has only been since the industrial revolution that education was done by ‘warehousing’ children in sit-down classrooms for long periods of time. We’ve only had the need to do this for the last hundred or so years so that children would have somewhere to go when their parents were at work. It is counterproductive to take a child, whose brain learns best in motion, and put them in a classroom (c)

setting wherein they must do what is counter to the production of neurotransmitters in their little brains: sit still. In ‘olden’ times when children spent most of their day actively engaged in chores, or helping the family around the house, rather than sitting in front of a computer or television, and when school was the only inactive time in a child’s day, there were relatively few children (c)

with the problems now defined as “ADD” and “ADHD”. What teachers are finding now is that children don’t have enough activity in their lives to stimulate the brain to make the neurotransmitters that tell the brain to calm down and focus. Hence books/programs like “Brain Gym”, which encourage classroom *activity* in the learning process. One example is learning spelling by doing a combination of (c)

hand and body movements which cross the right-brain left-brain axis (right hand to left thigh while saying the first letter of the word, opposite action with the second letter, etc). The learning curve in classes which practice this “Brain Gym” has improved dramatically. My own sons, One and Two, are ‘kinesthenic’ learners: they must be in motion in order to learn properly. They are simply (c)

hard-wired to learn this way. The teachers have been asked by the occupational therapists on staff at the school to allow children like my sons to chew coffee stirrers (those little plastic stir-sticks) or squeeze little balls, or do other small-motor activity which stimulates the release of neurotransmitters and allows them to be calm and focus. It works beautifully. Drugging 2-4 year olds is(c)

something I view as borderline criminal. Children that age MUST be in motion to learn, they must use their large-motor skills in order to be able to later use their small-motor skills. Preschool is NOT the place to even consider ‘diagnosing’ ADD/ADHD, because children this age are SUPPOSED to run around like little Banshees. It is the responsibility of the preschool teachers and environment to (c)

help the more active children learn to focus their energy as they get older and move toward becoming ready for Kindergarten. Medications will not do that for them, they must learn to regulate their own level of activity. If we throw medications at them it will just delay their natural development at best, and at worse lead to later drug dependencies as they attempt to “self-medicate” to control(c)

the natural impulses they never learned to control on their own. We’re simply wrong, as a society, to throw definitions on people and medicate them rather than helping them learn to self-police their own actions. While I’m sure there are a few limited instances of real ADD/ADHD, I agree with the above noter that they are few and far between and that the rest are just adults inability to deal (c)

with either active children or children having emotional difficulties or family problems. After all, its far easier to medicate Johnny into oblivion than to learn how Johnny learns and actually teach him. Sorry this is to long, Ren, but it touched a very raw nerve with me. ~Kind Thoughts~