The acceptance by parents of chemical substances as a solution, indeed a quick fix, to the dilemmas of perceived behaviour problems places our children in peril. I say our children because every child is the son or daughter of us all.
It is an immorality beyond which we can never recover, the lost potential of our precious children – children that will never become all they could become. You, as a parent, will never realize, never know what they did not become. How could you? The chalkboard was erased before it could be read.
Let’s be blunt!
Parents, you have been deceived, lied to and mislead about drugs like Ritalin. And you have not been told the truth about your child.
Teachers and school administrators are totally unqualified by any measure of qualification in the field of medicine, without license or even one clock hour of class instruction in a school of medicine, pharmacy or even veterinary medicine or nursing. And many are effectively practising medicine without a license.
These highly unqualified educators have boldly coxed, ordered and even threatened our poor worry laden parents into accepting the very things they so opposed and feared for their children – drugs. Drugs for a simple, fast and apparently effective solution to a perceived problem: an active child mislabelled as “hyper” active. A curious and overly simplistic label that, in one felt stroke, discounts and negates the entire history of fields like psychology and in-depth studies in pharmacology.
A strange label to us because Mrs. Anderson and I never met a single “hyper” active child in over thirty years of working with children. Active children yes! Some very active, like our own son. But all normal and within easily measurable parameters of young human beings.
But teachers, medically unqualified and obviously unqualified in the fields of behaviour management, motivation and curriculum or instruction, have demanded and even brow beat our exhausted, overworked and more and more depressed parents. Parents not knowing who to turn to and eventually trusting the child’s teacher.
A truly misplaced trust.
Guided by awesomely unknowledgeable and unqualified educators, parents literally rushed into a Doctor’s office with an agenda imposed upon their psyche by the overburdened, underfunded, ill prepared and highly trusted classroom teacher. A teacher who, typically, cannot possibly know, and who has little time to comprehend, the complexity of even a generalized cause and effect.
The cause: a normal, healthy and active child the teacher is unable or unwilling to motivate. She or he is constrained by so many elements, artificial definitions, financial limitations and bureaucratic or dogmatic burdens and barriers that the personalized needs of individual children can never be met.
The effect: a drugged up, compliant, sometimes nearly comatose child. A child forced into taking growth inhibiting, mind numbing, carcinogenic and ultimately disabling drugs which, taken long term and typically without appropriate monitoring, result in side effects that the poor parents simply had no awareness of. Unknown – unpredictable with NO longitudinal study!
“Oh My God! If I had only known!” We have heard parents exclaim. The loss of a child’s precious personality, the facial tics, the diminished curiosity and creativity, the potential of chromosomal abnormality, the loss of muscle mass, the strange developing inhibitions and many other yet unknown side effects and relational by-products resulting from effectively experimenting with our precious, and may I add, delicate children.
Do I still have your attention? Wake up!
Illegal drugs of a wide variety and easily available from a plethora of evil sources are destroying our children. And YOU, my dear parents, are a major contributor to their demise.
YOU were not armed with the knowledge or did not have the courage to stand up against even the legal and also easily available drugs of their earlier childhood. YOU communicated directly (remember taking them to the Doctor?) and effectively (remember insisting upon your child taking those pills?). YOU communicated to your trusting child that drugs are a fast and simple solution to problems. And now, in their not much later years, your children follow your example – and you are astonished.
Because of your trusting relationship, you became the most effective teacher known in history. You led your trusting child by example, and now, that child is grown and taking your example all the way to the alter and sacrificing their lives upon it, the pathway to which, was laden with chemical substances you approved of and effectively forced them to take.
The present situation has accurately been described by the media as an epidemic, even a tidal wave, of prescription drugs. The percentages reported now approach fifteen to twenty percent of some school populations. My, what have we done?
But no more tears!
After reading this, you shall have known what we have done. Please get on the internet. Search the subject. Prepare yourself with real, significant and hard data. You shall be truly astonished at what you find. And please, trust in your own judgement!
Inform yourself and use good judgement and a heaping teaspoon of common sense (substitute this for the mindless and mind numbing drug you were going to force upon your innocent child),
If you do not do your homework, what you do will be among the most immoral acts of betrayal that can be imagined. You will have betrayed that which you held most dear in your life – your children.
Please, no more tears. This continent is awash with tears and drugs. Stop crying and turn on your computer and start reading instead. Your child can show you how to do that.
Society today doesn’t tell you how to deal with problems other than, “Taking a Pill”. And our society is very ill.
William's Weblog - Anderson Private School for the Gifted, Talented and Creative 