When Jonah was in preschool, he had trouble sitting still. He had a lot of energy and sitting quietly in a circle was not his strong suit. He was hard-wired to run. He started walking at nine months and then never stopped. I remember pushing his empty stroller behind him, as he ran the whole mile back home from pre-school. He had zero interest in passively observing life.
He still is that way. During Saturday's trip into NYC, he leapt up on park benches. He tried to climb a wall into Central Park. He ran up the front stairs of the museum backwards. He moves. Constantly.
If I wanted to drug him up, so he moved less and remembered to turn in his homework more consistently, I could get those drugs for him without breaking a sweat. But I won't, because he doesn't need them. He's a high-energy kid and that's how he is wired.
Nobody has ever urged us to medicate Jonah, because he does well in school and he never gets into trouble, but other parents have told me stories about teachers pushing them to medicate their boys.
The number of boys who are diagnosed with ADHD has skyrocketed. According to the New York Times,
One in five boys? Maybe high-energy isn't a bug of boys. It's a feature. And maybe schools and the world isn't set up to deal with high-energy boys. And maybe we should stop pouring chemicals down the throats of our kids and learn how to deal with boys who need to walk up the stairs backwards and leap on park benches and climb walls. Maybe.Nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.