One in Five Now ADHD

Take five kids and now one of them is ADHD. Attention deficit hyperactive disorder. And this fifth kid is on either Ritalin, Vyvanase, or Adderall. And that is amazing. Rampant. A plague. An epidemic. Something. But there it is. You know it as a parent because every other parent you talk to their kid is on one of those drugs. And you come to accept that we are a nation where our kids just can't pay attention. But this seems to be the case. Or have we become a nation that cannot accept any deviations from the new normal?

Put this next to the ninety percent rise in autism since 2000 and a scary picture starts to emerge. But lets go back to this ADHD diagnosis that is applied to the fifth kid in every group. The experts say this statistic cannot be true. They point to the drug companies pedaling their wares as a big culprit. But they also point to parents who will do anything to make sure little Suzy or Johnny is getting good grades in school. It's little Johnny who is really screwed.

Boys. They are the fifth kid. Boys are diagnosed at something like twenty percent more than girls. Those darn boys just wont stay in their seat. They wont listen. Give them the drug. And they do. The problem is these drugs have awful side affects. They kill the appetite. Stunt growth. Their addictive. They ruin sleep. They wear off and the kid falls off a cliff. The drugs make kids edgy, temperamental, and worse they become a life prescription.

It is very hard for the parent to fight back against the physician and the teacher or the school that says your son or daughter is ADHD and we recommend this medication. But that is what parents should do. The drug should be the last resort not the first choice. Obviously there are many kids who need these drugs but many are on them who might just be a little edgy, restless. Or maybe they are someone who goes to the beat of a different drummer. You know an individual.

I know I was.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Rocket Man...the American dream upside down
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Autism makes jump from dads to granddads

One in eight. That is the statistic now for kids. One in eight has autism. Crazy. They tied it to the father. Old sperm. Seems the DNA mutates in older dads. Mom is off the hook. But dad who decided to sow his wild oats and then have a family is dealing with a stacked deck. The autism odds shoot way up. And now they have a co conspirator. Granddads.

Seems autism jumps a generation. And it's the granddads fault for holding out and having kids later. And it shows up in the next crop of kids. So that would explain why little Johnnie has autism when dad was twenty three. Granddad went off to the war and started a business and then had a kid. And his grandson has the affliction. Biology is brutal in this way. We really were designed to replicate and do it early.

As if older dads and granddads didn't have enough on their plate. They are huffing and puffing and trying to be that young cool dad but those years have a funny way of calling their marker. And like most old parents the bet is you can have it all. And then you realize you cant. Women get menopause and the men throw out damaged sperm.

And the kids get in a one in eight chance.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Our Autistic Society

Hmmm...seventy eight percent rise in autism since 2000. So we can't hide under the old well nobody was diagnosed before and we always had all these autistic kids and ask the question; what the hell is going on? It would seem in a society where everyone is deemed equal that we also not ask the question why then are so many of our children now ADD and Autistic and ADHD? Clearly we are not all created equal. All you have to do is have a kid in highschool and you stumble on Ritalin kiddies who have been on these drugs for years and might be on be on them their entire life.

And now that we can retire the tired old saw that there were always these kids around and that our now very proficient medical expertise has allowed us to diagnose them then we can ask the logical question of why is this happening to children in our society. Autism is a serious disorder and can render kids catatonic. So why is this happening? Environmental? Our digitized high pressure society. Mommies working. Radon? Vaccines. Food additives. Swelling population growth. Fertility drugs allowing us to circumvent mother nature and have a baby anyway?

Clearly there are errant genes. Clearly something is going on in the alphabet soup of the DNA of these kids that is altering their chromosomal destiny and producing children who cannot interact with other kids, parents, the society at large. And to ignore this strange malady rocketing across the population is to do so at our peril. It is not normal to have a seventy eight percent increase in autism and no... they were not always there waiting to be diagnosed.

I remember there was one kid in my junior high school who clearly was not right. He stood out like a sore thumb and was teased mercilessly. But he was truly a minority. Can we say that now? That there are just a few kids who are autistic or ADD or ADHD...or are we getting to where there are just a few normal kids left who have not fallen into the pharmalogical drugstore of our desperate NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND psychology. Or have we created a society that foments autism as a defence against our own psychotic pressure cooker neurosis?

Makes you wonder.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Our Sputnik Children

You can feel the desperation in American Education now. Tenure is under attack by the states. Pensions are getting busted. Nobody has the money to fund them and all those people skating along under the education umbrella are in danger of getting rained on with the rest of us. The teachers figured they would never fear the pain of the recession and now the clouds are gathering. You think of this as you talk to teachers about your kid and realize how little teaching goes on and how the ability to get a grade now passes for education. Robotic kids able to follow specific directions flourish while children who take time to think drown in the sorrow of failure. And America is behind the rest of the world.

Ramp up math and science. Then we will beat the Chinese. Forget about the ability to speak or think, lets be more linear. Engineers will certainly save American Education. Much the same for the Sputnick generation as that tin cat slingshots around the earth beep beeping way. We will bury you. We will bury you. We will bury you. The Chinese surround us with their low level hum, we own you we own we own you. Teachers put into overdrive to catch up. The kids must meet a higher standard. Download more lessons. Fill more time with more work with more computer time with more Blackboard.

But America never won the day by following rules. How did we win? As Steven Ambrose pointed out in Citizen Solider we won because the individual soldier, the grunt was given permission, nay, he was taught at a very early age to think for himself. To improvise, to create on the spot. So when he came up against his German counter part on the beaches of Normandy the soldier, the citizen solider figured out a way to get himself and his platoon off the beach. And that was good because the Germans waited for orders. They waited for someone who was hell on wheels in science and math to give them exact coordinates while a GI snuck up with a a flamethrower and incinerated their pillbox.

So out Sputnik children are on the line once again. At a booster event for the baseball team I brought up the movie Race to the Bottom to a man whose kids are on military footing in school and athletics. Outstanding achievers. Race to the Bottom is a  documentary that catalogs the stress kids are under now to achieve and how suicide and depression is on the rise among high school students. The man waved the movie away and scoffed. They don't like it then they should drop out he muttered. Wimps.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man wil blast off in March