Retired deputy assistant administrator of the DEA Gene Haislip commented that America has become the only country in the world whose children are prescribed such a vast quantity of stimulants that share the same properties as cocaine. The United States uses about eighty-five percent of the world’s Ritalin.
When I thought of Gray, I thought of exuberance, ebullience. His face was always radiant with emotion, and he was literally filled with energy, curiosity and enthusiasm for everything. Tickled by some event or other, he would sometimes throw his body recklessly through the air and onto his bed, ripped through with laughter. He would be unaware of the room, or of me, only attentive to the absurd thing that had made him laugh, and the hole of laughter into which he’d fallen. He was so animated, so full of ideas and questions, and already adamant in his opinions. What would this child be like on Ritalin?
I thought of Where the Wild Things Are, the Caldecott Medal-winning book by Maurice Sendak, which I read to Gray probably once a week. Everything about the protagonist, Max, the child in wolf’s clothing—his truculent and defiant nature, his “wildness,” his imagination, his restless body and spirit—reminded me of Gray. What kind of culture did I live in, where the same qualities that were admired and celebrated in a book were labeled as a disorder in the schools?
I could feel myself becoming stubborn, digging in against the principal’s recommendation, though I had little but intuition to support my yet unshaped feelings. It did seem, however, that drugs should be the last recourse, not the first. The accusation that Gray was inattentive baffled me; he had never been inattentive at home. He loved being read to, and he paid attention even when the books we read were long and didn’t have many pictures. He loved playing with his toys, certainly showing great attention there. True, I sometimes had to tell him several times to do something, and he was occasionally defiant, but that seemed to me healthy, a sort of testing of boundaries and limits that needn’t be pathologized. I was angry, though I couldn’t say at whom or what.
The way Ritalin was explained to parents in those days was a little like the way God is explained to young children: it’s a mystery in which you must have faith. Ritalin, doctors told us, was a stimulant that, on children, had the opposite effect. It somehow calmed them down instead of speeding them up. I could not wrap my head around the paradox that a stimulant could act as a sedative. We now know that Ritalin does not have a paradoxical effect on children; it affects them exactly as it affects adults, as a stimulant. Like methadone, it provides a substitute “high”; the stimulation is drug-produced so that kids don’t search for stimulation in the real world. According to Lawrence Diller, author of Running on Ritalin, what observers mistake for calm is intensified focus.
We weren’t doing our jobs as parents, the principal said, if we didn’t put Gray on Ritalin. In subsequent conversations, the principal continually emphasized that the consequences of not putting Gray on Ritalin were school failure such that he would eventually drop out, depression, conduct disorder, failed relationships, underachievement in the workplace, and substance abuse.
I decided, however, to resist the principal’s suggestion that we put Gray on Ritalin. I came from a family that had a history of substance abuse, and I did not wish to set my son on the road to drug use as a way to control his behavior. I had escaped the fate of many in my family, and would do everything in my power to help my son escape. Sanctioned or not, Ritalin had the same effects as cocaine, effects I knew well.
Before I left the principal’s office, I informed him I’d consider what he had said, but that either way I was going to sit in on Gray’s class. I also called Gray’s father and explained to him what the principal had said. We had a long conversation in which we agreed to try to make the environments at each house more similar, to have the same rules, the same consequences for breaking the rules, and make sure he was eating balanced meals at regular intervals at both homes. Consistency, we decided, was key.
I attended Gray’s kindergarten class the following Tuesday. I wanted Mrs. Merkin to forget I was there, so I brought some papers to grade, and since I myself didn’t teach on Tuesdays, I settled in for the whole day.
Mrs. Merkin was in her mid-twenties and could not have been teaching for very long. The class was large, with almost thirty students, and she clearly did not have the skills to manage such a crowded class. During the morning period, she constantly sent children—always boys—to the principal’s office, sometimes for minor infractions. Gray did not get into trouble that day (he was acutely aware that I was there), but I watched with interest as one little boy who, during a long period of coloring, decided to finish coloring standing up, was dressed down by Mrs. Merkin. She insisted he sit down to finish the coloring. Each time she turned around, he stood up again, still coloring, but standing and bending over the table. She’d run back to the table, order him to sit down, and the cycle would repeat. By the end of it, she was shrieking, the boy was sobbing, and she had grabbed him roughly by his collar and dragged him out the door and into the principal’s office. I was flabbergasted. If she acted this way while a parent was watching, I wondered what went on with no parent present.
Anything Mrs. Merkin taught, she taught by rote. There was no spark, no enthusiasm in her. She read the most mundane, simplistic stories to the kids in a monotonous, singsong voice. I read to Gray every night: The Odyssey, Watership Down, The Hobbit. He already knew most of his letters and could recognize many words. She was boring, the class was boring, and I didn’t blame Gray for acting out. Not only that, but she was inflexibly authoritarian, and I could see why Gray might buck against her rigid rules. Students had to sit utterly still almost every moment they were in the classroom, and then they had to lie still for forty-five minutes of “quiet time,” during which they couldn’t even look at picture books. Students were not allowed to talk during lunch either. I found this last an unbelievably harsh rule, but she defended it by saying that if they allowed the students to talk, they wouldn’t finish their meals on time. And who knows what unholy chaos would break out if they didn’t finish their meals on time?
If, as some contemporary researchers have suggested, ADD-diagnosed kids are addicted to sensory stimulation, being unable to engage with each other during lunchtime and then being forced to lie down for forty-five minutes with no stimulation must be torturous. Even if one doesn’t buy the theory that they are addicted to sensory stimulation, it’s unreasonable to expect that five-year-olds might willingly sit still during the whole of class with one recess break of fifteen minutes, have lunch where they can’t socialize, and be forced to lie still or take a forced nap for another forty-five minutes. It occurred to me after just one day in Gray’s class that not only does the traditional public-school structure privilege docile, obedient personalities, but for some children it constitutes a very real form of torture, all the worse because it’s sanctioned by those who most care about the children.
Later that evening, I asked Gray what he thought of Mrs. Merkin.
“She’s stupid!”
I didn’t say anything, although I actually agreed with him.
“She doesn’t even know how to pronounce some things. And she keeps calling me Greg.”
After a week of sitting in Mrs. Merkin’s class, I demanded that Gray be switched to another teacher. The principal said they didn’t usually switch teachers, but I was adamant, and eventually he gave in. Gray was put into a more seasoned teacher’s class, Mrs. Snyder’s class. I sat in the first day of class with her, too, and could see she was a bit more effective than Mrs. Merkin. She didn’t constantly send kids to the principal’s office but rather tried to handle infractions herself.
Things were okay for a little while, then Gray started to get in trouble again – notes were being sent home about him being fidgety and not paying attention. I began speaking with Mrs. Snyder several times a week, but nothing either of us did helped. Soon I got another call from the principal to meet with him.
The night before we were to meet, I read Gray another chapter of The Hobbit and snuggled in bed next to him. He was holding one of the stuffed animals he’d had since birth, the one we called “heart bear” because a red heart was stitched to