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The Myth of the Hyperactive Child: And Other Means of Child Control
A critical survey of the new politics, practices, and ideology, and related causes and consequences, of the medical and social control of children labelled as hyperactive, maladaptive, dysfunctional, and predelinquent, under the guise of diagnosis and treatment
- GenresNonfictionEducation
285 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1975
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January 29, 2023
I was hoping for a book that provided some statistics on how many kids were considered hyperactive in the past versus now, whether back then it was considered normal, and what percentage of kids grew out of it as they aged. Instead this book is more about how the hyperactive label was invented to give a medical diagnosis to kids whose behavior in school is problematic for teachers. “Traditional methods of management and control (threats, punishment, school suspensions) have been replaced by an accumulation of psychosocial and psychochemical techniques and by an ideology of ‘early intervention’ which regards almost every form of undesirable behavior, however benign, as a medical ailment requiring treatment” (xi). All nonconformity is sickness, deviance is disease (xii, xvi, 29, 67). The purpose for the change is to appear more humane while still attempting to control the child or modify behavior (23). It removes the blame from the child’s will and its upbringing by the parents, and places it on a brain disorder or genetic defect which is just bad luck and nobody’s fault (27, 55, 159). Having a medical label makes parents relieved to have an explanation for their child’s deviance that doesn’t put the blame on them (50, 51).
“Until World War II, children who didn’t behave in school were almost universally regarded as defective in will and character: they were bad, lazy or shiftless, or, if they worked hard and still failed, they were euphemistically described as slow. In the 1950s, the schools discovered Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis, hired staff psychologists, and began to attribute failure to ‘emotional handicaps,’ ‘reading blocks,’ or overbearing fathers. In the sixties, after they began to discover the poor and the black, they attributed failure to the effects of discrimination and ‘cultural disadvantage,’ and prescribed compensatory education as a remedy” (37). By the mid-60s, the attempt was made to reform the system for every possible individual difference. But by the end of the 60s, the money ran out, and there was more concern with maintaining order and discipline. Instead of blaming parents or environment, the blame was placed on something clinical (38-39). Instead of reforming the system, the focus became on reforming the individual child with drugs (40). Conveniently, reforming the system takes money from taxpayers and funnels it to the schools, but reforming the children takes money from the parents and funnels it toward the pharma companies, which get a customer for life for every child they label with a disorder (51). The schools are incentivized to label more kids as handicapped or disabled, because they get more money from state and federal agencies for each handicapped or disabled child (116).
The origin for this change started with a 12/30/69 request from Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker that the government should do mass testing on all 6-8 year olds to detect which have violent and homicidal tendencies (3). The drugs and intervention on the child was both to control their behavior in the classroom and also to prevent the child from becoming a delinquent or criminal later in life (4, 159, 165). Head Start had this origin (6). It’s also the origin of the IEP (individual education plan) which is supposed to be a customized education plan for retarded kids (6). Ironically, the IEP doesn’t allow the child to be an individual, but makes her conform to the system. “Individualization is the starting point, the word that precedes ‘diagnosis’ or ‘treatment,’ but rarely, if ever, the objective of the process. Health becomes a social obligation, a prime duty of state and citizen. It is a vision of a sterilized world” (25).
“There were problems that occurred in a small percentage of the population—for example, hyperactivity so severe that the child was a danger to himself or others-which had been stretched by definition to include large numbers of other individuals whose handicap, at worst, was social (e.g., irritating the teacher) and where intervention was merely a matter of institutional convenience. . . . In one Midwestern school system, the definitions had intentionally been stretched to the point where a system-wide screening procedure would turn up some ‘disability’ for every student” (22). “The sickness, in brief, was the inability to function in school” (42). The medical literature described “the true hyperkinetic as a rare individual, perhaps one in 2,000, who seems to be driven by an inner whirlwind, not just in school, but constantly. Unlike the children who now appear to be ‘hyperkinetic’ only in the classroom (but not, for example, in front of the television set), the true hyperkinetic was always moving, climbing, and knocking over furniture, and in constant danger of injuring himself or others” (42-43). The new definition was further extended to include every behavior which annoyed teachers and parents, and because of that extension, it was less likely to find a real physical brain problem to be the cause (43). I suspect that a lot of kids are labeled with ADHD (a term apparently too new to be used in this book which was written in 1975) are the way they are from too much TV watching at home which keeps kids entertained with lots of color/movement/stimulation, while their bodies just sit in one spot for long periods. Consequently, their bodies have a lot of energy that wants to get used, and the classroom setting is boring in comparison to a TV show, so the kids release their pent up energy in those boring environments. The book tells the story of Frank, a sixth grader who is lazy at home and sits and watches TV forever, but at school he won’t sit still and has trouble concentrating. The doctor tells him that he CAN’T sit still, but Frank insists that he WON’T because he doesn’t want to (68).
Learning disabilities “‘do not include learning problems which are due primarily to visual, hearing or motor handicaps, to mental retardation, emotional disturbance or to environmental disadvantage.’ Learning disabilities, in other words, is a disease by default, the medical ailment which can be ascribed to those children who have no other problems but who don’t learn to talk or read as their elders think they should. They are the children who are not mentally retarded, physically handicapped or sufficiently ‘disturbed’ emotionally to be assigned to conventional ‘special education’ classes but are difficult enough, nonetheless, to frustrate the routine of the ordinary school program. Since there are two fundamental requirements in that program, acceptable academic performance and compliant behavior, there are also two basic categories of learning-disabled children. Those who, despite a background in model, middle-class homes and despite adequate IQ scores, defy pedagogical expectations by performing poorly in one or more academic areas get the pure LD labels—dyslexia, dysgraphia, aphasia, agnosia—depending on what the system regards as the specific problem area. Those who bother teachers with generally unacceptable classroom behavior are labeled ‘hyperactive’ or ‘hyperkinetic.’ If they are children who simply persist in annoying conduct—wiggling in their seats, repeatedly asking the same question, tapping a foot—the description may be more discrete: ‘short attention span,’ ‘impulsivity,’ ‘distractibility,’ ‘perseveration’” (34).
“Given the profusion of labels, diagnoses and ailments, and the vagueness of the terms, it is hardly surprising that there is no agreement on the number of children who are said to suffer from learning disabilities. Estimates range from a negligible 3% to better than 40%—something in excess of 15 million individuals—and the figures are rising” (35). “In Washington, court-ordered testing of ‘special’ track children revealed that two-thirds had been mislabeled and misplaced and should have been in regular classes. Similar results have been reported in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities” (117).
“There were studies which indicated that hyperactivity is a normal variant of temperament and not a neurological disorder (46).
“From the beginning . . . The prime object had been not cure but control” (83, 93). Kids are screened to “place the child in school and determine his ‘needs.’ The decision is managerial, not therapeutic” (122). The FDA regards Ritalin as a dangerous drug, yet people think it’s more humane to give it to kids rather than spank them (57, 71). If the child is taken off the drug, the bad behaviors come back, as the child never learned to control themself, and instead the drug was being used a crutch (71, 87). That’s the seductiveness of successful drug treatment—that it temporarily solves the problem without asking the people involved to do anything” (87). And although Ritalin gets kids to be less problematic, it doesn’t improve their scholastic achievement (89). “Youngsters on drugs are far less responsive and enthusiastic, and are far more apathetic, humorless and zombie-like” (89). “Too much medication makes them a vegetable” (93).
“It is the ideology of drugging, the idea that people can and should be chemically managed, that represents the most pervasive imposition on personal liberty and the most dangerous extension of authority. The seductive counterargument that a certain drug isn’t hurting a certain child—that, indeed, it has made him ‘happier’ and more successful—and that one should not sacrifice his well-being to some political abstraction, is itself a disguised political argument in defense of the standards that determine his ‘happiness’ and success. The argument seems to prove that while the child may not become dependent on the drug, those who recommend and defend it already are” (106).
“There is nothing new about teachers and parents complaining that children are difficult to teach or control. Teachers have traditionally assumed that between a fourth and a third of their students would be academic losers, and mothers have always complained that their children can’t sit still. In 1958, for example, a study of a representative group of mothers found that half regarded their own children as overactive, and ten years later a survey of the entire school system in Des Moines, Iowa, showed that teachers believed that 53% of the boys and 30% of the girls were having problems associated with too much activity. What is new, however, is the increasingly fashionable attribution of common problems to neurological abnormalities, and the increasingly common description of ‘these affected children’ as victims of a clearly defined medical syndrome” (36). “Of the 756 reports on the psychotropic medication of children published between 1937 and March 1971, only a handful reflected controlled studies using the direct measurement of behavior to indicate drug effects; in more than half of those studies, no significant difference was found between drug and placebo effect. When psychological testing was the criterion, the percentage of studies which showed no effect was even higher. It was only in the studies where subjective ‘clinical impressions’ were used as a criterion that significant effects were reported” (84). 37-67% of kids on placebo showed significant improvement (91). Some teachers are tricked into thinking the kid is on medication when they are in fact not. Some parents send their kid to a new school when the old teacher advised drugs, and the new teacher doesn’t mention the kid being a problem; some teachers are better able to handle “hyper” kids. “One recent survey of classroom teachers showed that 88% were confident that they could identify the hyperactive children in their classrooms; in a related study, however, examinations of 100 children deemed sufficiency hyperactive by teachers and school counselors to be referred to a clinic showed that the doctors could agree on only 13% as being hyperactive” (125). Some learning disabled kids perform worse in the “special” classroom than they did in the regular classroom (36-37). In my opinion, problematic students would probably do best academically if they got individual attention/tutoring instead of being taught to as a group where there are many distractions and the temptation to seek out attention. If this is true, then expulsion would be in the child’s best interest, forcing the child to be homeschooled by parents.
The new official label for these problematic kids was “minimal brain dysfunction.” “The ‘minimal’ indicated the absence of extreme behavior, and ‘dysfunction’ was used to get around the necessity of finding an organic problem. Henceforth, MBD would simply mean any form of behavior that adults found troublesome” (44). “MBD is never exactly the same in any two children, and the precise cause is not known—so MBD is difficult to pin down to a simple definition” (58).
Psychiatrist Dr. Camilla M. Anderson said that most people with MBD come from poor families. “If this position makes you squeamish, spend a few years in prison or the ghettoes, which exist even in sparsely populated areas. You will find that whereas slums make people, the basic truth is that people make slums; they cannot do otherwise” (15).
“Truancy is the kindergarten of crime” said psychologist Chester D. Poremba (160).
A university psychologist said that most delinquents suffer from hyperkinetic impulsive disorder, “a neurological incapacity to control their own actions” (20). “A child who cannot control his violence is also the child who cannot control his speech” (150). I suppose it makes sense that if a kid can’t control their own body, then they may not be likely to control themselves when they want something they don’t own or can’t afford. It’s possible a hyper kid could grow out of their hyperness, but it’s also possible they may not. Whereas a kid who starts out already in good control over their body will likely only improve in control as they age, not worsen. But these are just likelihoods, not guarantees. 50 of 67 boys rated as likely to become delinquent had not become delinquent seven years later (154). In another study, 63% of 305 likely delinquent boys didn’t become delinquents. “As in the Youth Board Study in New York, treatment (consisting of ‘intensive’ social work) produced negative results: the treatment group produced a greater percentage of delinquents than the control group” (155). I’d like to know statistics for the kids *not* predicted to become delinquents too, but the book doesn’t mention them.
Mesomorphs are more likely to become delinquents, and endomorphs are the least likely (11, 157). Most gifted kids come from Northern and Western Europe and the Jewish while the least come from the Mexicans, Negroes, and Mediterranean races (12).
A state-wide study in Illinois found that “more than half the adolescents in the national population have committed acts (including shoplifting or other petty theft) which fit the legal definition of delinquency—43% have driven a car without a license; 22% ran away from home at least once; 10% have gone joyriding in a car ‘that was stolen for the ride.’ Less than half of them have ever been arrested. The Illinois study indicated, moreover, that contrary to expectations drawn from official police or court records (which are based on arrests), girls commit almost as many delinquent acts as boys, whites as blacks, rich as poor” (147).
I’m in agreement with the authors when it comes to hyperactivity, but not when it comes to delinquents. They seem to believe that “delinquency is too often a reflection of ‘cultural intolerance of diversity and variability” (148). I’d say that stealing is wrong in any culture and should be punished. Running away from home shouldn’t be a crime, but it’s also not something that is about “cultural diversity.” Kids probably run away from home most often because of abuse taking place in the home, and that abuse is what should be illegal and punished. Instead of punishing the kids for running away, the police should investigate why the kid ran away and see if the parents need to be arrested. Of course there are also kids who run away from home because they want to live out on the streets, do drugs, and commit crimes. For those kids, punish the illegal acts, not the running away itself.
In 1975, the FDA decided that MBD “lacked sufficient medical foundation to be associated with the prescription of drugs” (107). But drugs like Ritalin continued to be prescribed, just for the symptoms of MBD instead of for the diagnosis of MBD. “It appeared to be an admission that unacceptable behavior by itself was sufficient reason to feed a child a psychoactive drug, that no organic illness need even be suggested” (107).
Rewarding juvenile inmates for the good conduct of the group resulted in fewer boys being beaten by guards but more were being beaten by other inmates (224). Positive reinforcement doesn’t produce lasting behavioral change after the reinforcement period ends, except with autistic kids (212). Awarding gold stars to kids who learn new words won’t make kids love literature (213). But schools don’t care about making kids love learning outside of school; they only care about managing and controlling the child while in school (213). I’ve found that most modern discipline books also are just concerned with getting the child to behave for the moment, but not long lasting respect and obedience of the parent that lasts years or a lifetime.
“Teachers are told that ‘educationally’ children ‘seem to thrive best when sexual roles are carefully assigned.’” Example of normal development of sexual identity: girls play with dolls and become mother’s helper (112). This was probably the common thinking as late as 2004 when I was in college. But now things are so different, with teachers actively encouraging kids to be transgender.
“Until World War II, children who didn’t behave in school were almost universally regarded as defective in will and character: they were bad, lazy or shiftless, or, if they worked hard and still failed, they were euphemistically described as slow. In the 1950s, the schools discovered Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis, hired staff psychologists, and began to attribute failure to ‘emotional handicaps,’ ‘reading blocks,’ or overbearing fathers. In the sixties, after they began to discover the poor and the black, they attributed failure to the effects of discrimination and ‘cultural disadvantage,’ and prescribed compensatory education as a remedy” (37). By the mid-60s, the attempt was made to reform the system for every possible individual difference. But by the end of the 60s, the money ran out, and there was more concern with maintaining order and discipline. Instead of blaming parents or environment, the blame was placed on something clinical (38-39). Instead of reforming the system, the focus became on reforming the individual child with drugs (40). Conveniently, reforming the system takes money from taxpayers and funnels it to the schools, but reforming the children takes money from the parents and funnels it toward the pharma companies, which get a customer for life for every child they label with a disorder (51). The schools are incentivized to label more kids as handicapped or disabled, because they get more money from state and federal agencies for each handicapped or disabled child (116).
The origin for this change started with a 12/30/69 request from Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker that the government should do mass testing on all 6-8 year olds to detect which have violent and homicidal tendencies (3). The drugs and intervention on the child was both to control their behavior in the classroom and also to prevent the child from becoming a delinquent or criminal later in life (4, 159, 165). Head Start had this origin (6). It’s also the origin of the IEP (individual education plan) which is supposed to be a customized education plan for retarded kids (6). Ironically, the IEP doesn’t allow the child to be an individual, but makes her conform to the system. “Individualization is the starting point, the word that precedes ‘diagnosis’ or ‘treatment,’ but rarely, if ever, the objective of the process. Health becomes a social obligation, a prime duty of state and citizen. It is a vision of a sterilized world” (25).
“There were problems that occurred in a small percentage of the population—for example, hyperactivity so severe that the child was a danger to himself or others-which had been stretched by definition to include large numbers of other individuals whose handicap, at worst, was social (e.g., irritating the teacher) and where intervention was merely a matter of institutional convenience. . . . In one Midwestern school system, the definitions had intentionally been stretched to the point where a system-wide screening procedure would turn up some ‘disability’ for every student” (22). “The sickness, in brief, was the inability to function in school” (42). The medical literature described “the true hyperkinetic as a rare individual, perhaps one in 2,000, who seems to be driven by an inner whirlwind, not just in school, but constantly. Unlike the children who now appear to be ‘hyperkinetic’ only in the classroom (but not, for example, in front of the television set), the true hyperkinetic was always moving, climbing, and knocking over furniture, and in constant danger of injuring himself or others” (42-43). The new definition was further extended to include every behavior which annoyed teachers and parents, and because of that extension, it was less likely to find a real physical brain problem to be the cause (43). I suspect that a lot of kids are labeled with ADHD (a term apparently too new to be used in this book which was written in 1975) are the way they are from too much TV watching at home which keeps kids entertained with lots of color/movement/stimulation, while their bodies just sit in one spot for long periods. Consequently, their bodies have a lot of energy that wants to get used, and the classroom setting is boring in comparison to a TV show, so the kids release their pent up energy in those boring environments. The book tells the story of Frank, a sixth grader who is lazy at home and sits and watches TV forever, but at school he won’t sit still and has trouble concentrating. The doctor tells him that he CAN’T sit still, but Frank insists that he WON’T because he doesn’t want to (68).
Learning disabilities “‘do not include learning problems which are due primarily to visual, hearing or motor handicaps, to mental retardation, emotional disturbance or to environmental disadvantage.’ Learning disabilities, in other words, is a disease by default, the medical ailment which can be ascribed to those children who have no other problems but who don’t learn to talk or read as their elders think they should. They are the children who are not mentally retarded, physically handicapped or sufficiently ‘disturbed’ emotionally to be assigned to conventional ‘special education’ classes but are difficult enough, nonetheless, to frustrate the routine of the ordinary school program. Since there are two fundamental requirements in that program, acceptable academic performance and compliant behavior, there are also two basic categories of learning-disabled children. Those who, despite a background in model, middle-class homes and despite adequate IQ scores, defy pedagogical expectations by performing poorly in one or more academic areas get the pure LD labels—dyslexia, dysgraphia, aphasia, agnosia—depending on what the system regards as the specific problem area. Those who bother teachers with generally unacceptable classroom behavior are labeled ‘hyperactive’ or ‘hyperkinetic.’ If they are children who simply persist in annoying conduct—wiggling in their seats, repeatedly asking the same question, tapping a foot—the description may be more discrete: ‘short attention span,’ ‘impulsivity,’ ‘distractibility,’ ‘perseveration’” (34).
“Given the profusion of labels, diagnoses and ailments, and the vagueness of the terms, it is hardly surprising that there is no agreement on the number of children who are said to suffer from learning disabilities. Estimates range from a negligible 3% to better than 40%—something in excess of 15 million individuals—and the figures are rising” (35). “In Washington, court-ordered testing of ‘special’ track children revealed that two-thirds had been mislabeled and misplaced and should have been in regular classes. Similar results have been reported in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities” (117).
“There were studies which indicated that hyperactivity is a normal variant of temperament and not a neurological disorder (46).
“From the beginning . . . The prime object had been not cure but control” (83, 93). Kids are screened to “place the child in school and determine his ‘needs.’ The decision is managerial, not therapeutic” (122). The FDA regards Ritalin as a dangerous drug, yet people think it’s more humane to give it to kids rather than spank them (57, 71). If the child is taken off the drug, the bad behaviors come back, as the child never learned to control themself, and instead the drug was being used a crutch (71, 87). That’s the seductiveness of successful drug treatment—that it temporarily solves the problem without asking the people involved to do anything” (87). And although Ritalin gets kids to be less problematic, it doesn’t improve their scholastic achievement (89). “Youngsters on drugs are far less responsive and enthusiastic, and are far more apathetic, humorless and zombie-like” (89). “Too much medication makes them a vegetable” (93).
“It is the ideology of drugging, the idea that people can and should be chemically managed, that represents the most pervasive imposition on personal liberty and the most dangerous extension of authority. The seductive counterargument that a certain drug isn’t hurting a certain child—that, indeed, it has made him ‘happier’ and more successful—and that one should not sacrifice his well-being to some political abstraction, is itself a disguised political argument in defense of the standards that determine his ‘happiness’ and success. The argument seems to prove that while the child may not become dependent on the drug, those who recommend and defend it already are” (106).
“There is nothing new about teachers and parents complaining that children are difficult to teach or control. Teachers have traditionally assumed that between a fourth and a third of their students would be academic losers, and mothers have always complained that their children can’t sit still. In 1958, for example, a study of a representative group of mothers found that half regarded their own children as overactive, and ten years later a survey of the entire school system in Des Moines, Iowa, showed that teachers believed that 53% of the boys and 30% of the girls were having problems associated with too much activity. What is new, however, is the increasingly fashionable attribution of common problems to neurological abnormalities, and the increasingly common description of ‘these affected children’ as victims of a clearly defined medical syndrome” (36). “Of the 756 reports on the psychotropic medication of children published between 1937 and March 1971, only a handful reflected controlled studies using the direct measurement of behavior to indicate drug effects; in more than half of those studies, no significant difference was found between drug and placebo effect. When psychological testing was the criterion, the percentage of studies which showed no effect was even higher. It was only in the studies where subjective ‘clinical impressions’ were used as a criterion that significant effects were reported” (84). 37-67% of kids on placebo showed significant improvement (91). Some teachers are tricked into thinking the kid is on medication when they are in fact not. Some parents send their kid to a new school when the old teacher advised drugs, and the new teacher doesn’t mention the kid being a problem; some teachers are better able to handle “hyper” kids. “One recent survey of classroom teachers showed that 88% were confident that they could identify the hyperactive children in their classrooms; in a related study, however, examinations of 100 children deemed sufficiency hyperactive by teachers and school counselors to be referred to a clinic showed that the doctors could agree on only 13% as being hyperactive” (125). Some learning disabled kids perform worse in the “special” classroom than they did in the regular classroom (36-37). In my opinion, problematic students would probably do best academically if they got individual attention/tutoring instead of being taught to as a group where there are many distractions and the temptation to seek out attention. If this is true, then expulsion would be in the child’s best interest, forcing the child to be homeschooled by parents.
The new official label for these problematic kids was “minimal brain dysfunction.” “The ‘minimal’ indicated the absence of extreme behavior, and ‘dysfunction’ was used to get around the necessity of finding an organic problem. Henceforth, MBD would simply mean any form of behavior that adults found troublesome” (44). “MBD is never exactly the same in any two children, and the precise cause is not known—so MBD is difficult to pin down to a simple definition” (58).
Psychiatrist Dr. Camilla M. Anderson said that most people with MBD come from poor families. “If this position makes you squeamish, spend a few years in prison or the ghettoes, which exist even in sparsely populated areas. You will find that whereas slums make people, the basic truth is that people make slums; they cannot do otherwise” (15).
“Truancy is the kindergarten of crime” said psychologist Chester D. Poremba (160).
A university psychologist said that most delinquents suffer from hyperkinetic impulsive disorder, “a neurological incapacity to control their own actions” (20). “A child who cannot control his violence is also the child who cannot control his speech” (150). I suppose it makes sense that if a kid can’t control their own body, then they may not be likely to control themselves when they want something they don’t own or can’t afford. It’s possible a hyper kid could grow out of their hyperness, but it’s also possible they may not. Whereas a kid who starts out already in good control over their body will likely only improve in control as they age, not worsen. But these are just likelihoods, not guarantees. 50 of 67 boys rated as likely to become delinquent had not become delinquent seven years later (154). In another study, 63% of 305 likely delinquent boys didn’t become delinquents. “As in the Youth Board Study in New York, treatment (consisting of ‘intensive’ social work) produced negative results: the treatment group produced a greater percentage of delinquents than the control group” (155). I’d like to know statistics for the kids *not* predicted to become delinquents too, but the book doesn’t mention them.
Mesomorphs are more likely to become delinquents, and endomorphs are the least likely (11, 157). Most gifted kids come from Northern and Western Europe and the Jewish while the least come from the Mexicans, Negroes, and Mediterranean races (12).
A state-wide study in Illinois found that “more than half the adolescents in the national population have committed acts (including shoplifting or other petty theft) which fit the legal definition of delinquency—43% have driven a car without a license; 22% ran away from home at least once; 10% have gone joyriding in a car ‘that was stolen for the ride.’ Less than half of them have ever been arrested. The Illinois study indicated, moreover, that contrary to expectations drawn from official police or court records (which are based on arrests), girls commit almost as many delinquent acts as boys, whites as blacks, rich as poor” (147).
I’m in agreement with the authors when it comes to hyperactivity, but not when it comes to delinquents. They seem to believe that “delinquency is too often a reflection of ‘cultural intolerance of diversity and variability” (148). I’d say that stealing is wrong in any culture and should be punished. Running away from home shouldn’t be a crime, but it’s also not something that is about “cultural diversity.” Kids probably run away from home most often because of abuse taking place in the home, and that abuse is what should be illegal and punished. Instead of punishing the kids for running away, the police should investigate why the kid ran away and see if the parents need to be arrested. Of course there are also kids who run away from home because they want to live out on the streets, do drugs, and commit crimes. For those kids, punish the illegal acts, not the running away itself.
In 1975, the FDA decided that MBD “lacked sufficient medical foundation to be associated with the prescription of drugs” (107). But drugs like Ritalin continued to be prescribed, just for the symptoms of MBD instead of for the diagnosis of MBD. “It appeared to be an admission that unacceptable behavior by itself was sufficient reason to feed a child a psychoactive drug, that no organic illness need even be suggested” (107).
Rewarding juvenile inmates for the good conduct of the group resulted in fewer boys being beaten by guards but more were being beaten by other inmates (224). Positive reinforcement doesn’t produce lasting behavioral change after the reinforcement period ends, except with autistic kids (212). Awarding gold stars to kids who learn new words won’t make kids love literature (213). But schools don’t care about making kids love learning outside of school; they only care about managing and controlling the child while in school (213). I’ve found that most modern discipline books also are just concerned with getting the child to behave for the moment, but not long lasting respect and obedience of the parent that lasts years or a lifetime.
“Teachers are told that ‘educationally’ children ‘seem to thrive best when sexual roles are carefully assigned.’” Example of normal development of sexual identity: girls play with dolls and become mother’s helper (112). This was probably the common thinking as late as 2004 when I was in college. But now things are so different, with teachers actively encouraging kids to be transgender.
September 23, 2025
It’s remarkable that this book was written back in 1975—its insights still feel strikingly relevant today, even though the terminology around hyperactivity has evolved. At times it can feel a bit lengthy, but that’s only because it is so well detailed and thoroughly referenced. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject and to (future) parents. And if you enjoy this work, I suggest exploring the other titles in the same series, beginning with "Il medico immaginario e il malato per forza" by Giorgio Bert.
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