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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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Better Kids Through Chemistry?

By Natalie Angier
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2000, at 11:55 AM ET

Jonathan,

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The kids-on-meds story has hit the front page of every newspaper, it seems, and with good reason. It's a national scandal, as you say. Ritalin is a powerful psychoactive drug, and I should know. I've taken it myself, not for attention deficit disorder but as an adjunct to standard antidepressants. Whoa momma, it has an effect, and not always a pleasant one. I realize that the standard pharmaco rap is that Ritalin-like drugs are supposed to have a different impact on children than they do on adults--calming rather than stimulating--but can we say this with certainty about a 3-year-old? Three-year-olds can't articulate how a drug makes them feel. And their brains are still growing. And we don't have a clue what these drugs do to growing brains!

I'd as soon give my 3½-year-old daughter a line of cocaine as I would Ritalin. Perhaps parents would do well to try the drugs themselves before feeding them to their children. All of which sounds terribly naive and self-righteous on my part, I realize, but there's something to the notion of applying the golden rule to medicine as much as to life.

It helps to keep in mind that the spectacular rise in Ritalin use corresponds to the following: a rise in average class size; a reduction in the amount of time that American children spend being physically active--Japanese kids get two to three times more playground breaks during the day than our children do; increasing homework loads; a narrowing of options for those in our culture who can't sit still and learn. Charlotte Tomaino, a neuropsychologist in White Plains, N.Y., once said to me, "A generation or two ago, a kid with a learning disorder could drop out of school and pick up a trade. He could become the best bridge-builder in town. Now we define success as how well you keep up with the tremendous cognitive demands put on you."

Then again, why should we expect that our kids should have fun being kids? What's fun got to do with anything? In most of the world, kids don't have anything resembling a playful childhood. They start working at the age of 2 or 3 (just about the time we're now medicating our kids). They do field work, they gather food, they find water, they schlep water back home. They take care of younger kids. Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell University who's working on a book about kids around the world, told me that the most amazing fact she's learned so far is this: Ninety percent of the child care in the world is done by other children. And one thing I know for sure. When my older sister and brother used to take care of me, they would have been more than happy to give me a drug to make me shut up and go to sleep.

Natalie