The very worst problem with ADHD drugs is that they are overwhelmingly used to "treat" normal behavior with children - especially boys.
- The treatment of “behavior” precedes the treatment itself, diagnosis is external to patients, and the benefits are consequently poorly understood
- they’re abused by people who don’t benefit from them, so their impact is distorted
That said, I wish my parents had wanted to treat my “normal” behavior when I was young. It would have saved me decades of turmoil, almost certainly would have helped me avoid self medicating with alcohol, and probably would have helped me avoid several emergent mental health situations.
My parents thought this way too. And as a consequence I had to go without care for my entire childhood, and was unaware care could help for two decades after.
Do you know WHY boys are more likely to be diagnosed as "combined type" ADHD and treated than girls? It is primarily because their motor-dominant brains develop differentially: the dopaminergic systems in their motor cortex make them move more and disrupt more than girls.
Girls, whose motor-cortex and executive function develop differently, are much more likely to be the primarily-inattentive subtype, which leads to day dreaming and aloofness, but not to the disruptive behaviors that boys with ADHD exhibit. Therefore, girls fly under the radar and are missed because boys simply move more and have less control over their movement.
Nevertheless, your post is a bit reckless in my opinion. Add some real scientific evidence to your generalization. These are children who have less friends, abuse drugs more, are more likely to have depression or anxiety, and are far more likely to kill themselves. This neurodevelopmental disorder really matters, it's not a flippant case of drugging boys whose parents didn't raise them right.
As a boy I was raised to be inquisitive, open, masculine, physical and explorative.
I was also raised to be gentle and tolerant of those around me.
Those are not traits that are welcome in most schools for maybe the past 20 years. So more and more boys are indeed given medications to “calm down” what are really natural traits of masculinity.
He's now in a private school which takes place predominantly outdoors, nature based, and the transformation in him is phenomenal. The anxiety is gone and he's such an open mind and engages in conversations in ways he'd shy away from before.
I wonder and worry about kids who've experienced the same but suffer it for their entire grade-school experience with no reprieve.
It's more about people not wanting to bother to deal with the nature of most boys.
Rowdy, inquisitive, can't sit still.
These are all traits that for the most part -- make one a good person later in life. Now most teachers just can't deal with them and label them as "toxic" that requires medication.
His teachers were aware that he was likely ADHD and were extremely tolerant of his behavior. His teacher said that he ran into people while he was a motorcycle, because that's just a thing that motorcycles do. The biting was a little more convoluted, but his logic was that it was ok because he told the other kid that he could bite him back.
The way our therapist put it was that as people age they can self-regulate better. We're using the medication to keep him alive (without it he's impulsive to the point that he'd run out into busy traffic to chase something shiny) until he develops better self-regulation.