Gray’s was the first generation whose defining features, specifically their short attention span, lack of respect for authority, and seeming lack of ambition were pathologized. If we accept that Attention Deficit Disorder is in fact a disorder, Gray’s generation was the one to which it was first applied almost wholesale, as was the practice of using stimulants to control it. Our attitude has been to punish or drug the kids, and to demonize rather than try to understand the culture that influences them.
Once a diagnosis of ADD is made of a child, that label tends to dominate how we see that child. No longer do we see a child with a cultural and personal history, a child (and parents) caught in a struggle with a sometimes idiotic school system over which all may feel powerless, a bright, quick, heartbreakingly insightful and imaginative child; we see a child with ADD. The label functions as a pair of sunglasses we put on whenever we look at our child, glasses that mute the brightness, shade the subtle but important colors. In that respect, Gray’s nightmare about the magic diamond that makes kids look ugly is quite appropriate.
The most striking common denominators of ADD children are their painful difficulties in our public-school system and the profound failure of the schools to find a way to embrace and nurture these children. The way Gray’s school chose to deal with him is typical of what we still find in many American schools: drug or punish. And though there are, as I’ve noted, many issues, both cultural and genetic, that we need to consider when thinking about these children, it is the issue of schooling over which we have most power, as a culture, to affect. We can’t change genes, we can’t always change popular culture, we can’t always change the way a parent interacts with a child. We can, however, change the way our public schools treat children.
The medical profession has as its motto do no harm, and this is the very least we can ask of our school system. Gray has come of age in a world of perhaps unparalleled violence and aggression. Is it surprising that a nation that still allows its children to be beaten in schools produces soldiers who can perform the kinds of physical abuse of international prisoners we have witnessed in the media over the last few years? It can also come as no surprise that, in 2014, one in three students claim to have been bullied at school, and that the rise in other school-related violence, including the recent widely publicized school shootings, has reached an obscene level.
Grays’ principal was practicing, on a small scale, the principles of terrorism. Even though the principal believed my son had a disorder that did not allow him to attend, despite his belief that my son needed medication to “behave,” he still beat him, just as we still execute death-row prisoners who are demonstrably mentally ill. The principal, by his own admission, wanted to instill terror in my son’s heart. It didn’t work, although it succeeded in wounding him, possibly, I worry, for the rest of his life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, cautions those of us who fight monsters to take care that we not become monsters ourselves. Let’s begin by shining our magic diamonds such that we do not see our children as monsters. Let’s at least consider that through gross neglect, our schools may have become torture chambers for some of our children. Let’s stop relying on drugs and punishment as the major tools in our toolboxes to deal with these children.
Let’s do something radical: let’s work on understanding generations so wondrously strange and challenging. I am only one mother writing about a son and a generation for whom this advice comes too late. If our unhappy story can change just a few people’s minds about what we are doing to our children in our schools, it is worth the pain of having had to tell it.
For the next generations.
Note:
The few studies that exist looking at ADHD-diagnosed children and later addiction are inconclusive; some suggest that children treated with stimulants have a lower rate of addiction to other substances, while others suggest that use of stimulants in childhood can lead to later addiction. In Dopesick, her recent book charting the opioid crisis, Beth Macy writes “Almost to a person, the addicted twentysomethings I met had taken attention-deficit medication as children, prescribed pills that as they entered adolescence morphed from study aid to party aid.” Macy quotes Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction medicine specialist at Stanford University School of Medicine: “… if we really believe that addiction is a result of changes in the brain due to chronic heavy drug exposure, how can we believe that stimulant exposure isn’t going to change these kids’ brains in a way that makes them more vulnerable to harder drugs?”2
Between 2000 and 2010, diagnosis of children with ADHD rose 25% in the United States. If there is even a small chance of a relationship between early stimulant use in children and later addiction we should be concentrating massive amounts of resources into researching that connection.
1 Though this diagnosis is now referred to as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), I use ADD in this essay because that was the term used when Gray was diagnosed in the late eighties, early nineties.
2 Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, Beth Macy. Little Brown and Company, 2018. pp. 134-135.
Fireflies
When Gray was in junior high we lived in Iowa where he stayed with me in the summers, and with his dad, in Dallas, for the school year. I would feel sad when the fireflies came in August because I knew it was almost time for him to return to his father’s. We had a ritual of going out to watch fireflies the evening before he had to leave.
One August evening in those years we took our last walk of the summer to the park near our house. Gray ran around the open field in the park’s center, buoyed by an energy my body had long forgotten, sweat shining on his forehead like a kind of body-light in the setting sun. He ran to the merry-go-round and pushed it in faster and faster circles.
“Hey mom, look at this!” he yelled, hanging on to the side railings in a casual kind of way, to show that he could handle the danger, no problem.
He ran from the rails to the slide, then up and down the slide, then back to the merry-go-round in a dizzying performance of young male energy. Two girls watched silently from the edge of the playground. It was beautiful, this display of energy; it was everything I thought of when I thought of youth, yet I couldn’t help but remember his elementary school teachers complaining endlessly of this very vigor.
Every now and then he’d look over to make sure I was watching, and I’d smile. I didn’t want him to know how torn I was at his leaving, didn’t want him to feel the dark thing already growing in my throat like some new infection.
I blinked back my grief, then suddenly it was really dusk and the whole field, every inch of it, came alive with the glowing bodies of thousands of fireflies, blinking their own spirit, searching for something kindred. Their light felt like a blessing, a consolation, a reminder of how beautiful the earth was, and Gray: look at me, look at me, remember, remember this, they seemed to blink. Their flashing lights were a reminder that what makes life beautiful is precisely the fact that it doesn’t last.
The world looked upside down, as if the stars had descended to cover the earth for a time, to touch us with their smallest lights. May none of these be broken, I asked, may they stay whole until their short lives stop, may someone be there, sober and full of human light, watching over their sweet, boundless energy.
Yarn
I love to work with yarn that’s hand-spun, hand dyed or painted by someone who loves wool, and cares for the animals who give it up to us—there’s such loveliness in the unevenness of it, the unexpected variations in color as a strand slips through your fingers, its coarse silkiness, even though sometimes the spinner misses a twist, creates a weakness that will reveal itself in the finished product, the yarn thinning to almost nothing