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by
Leonard Sax
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April 20 - April 23, 2020
The job of the parent is to teach self-control. To explain what is and is not acceptable. To establish boundaries and enforce consequences.
There is no law prohibiting doctors from accepting millions of dollars from drug companies.
Psychiatric social worker Elizabeth Root observes that parents are “satisfied with the quick fix” that medications offer. Parents then don’t want to do the hard work of getting to the bottom of the problem.
Child psychiatrist Elizabeth Roberts goes even further: “Psychiatrists are now misdiagnosing and overmedicating children for ordinary defiance and misbehavior. The
Kids need authority in their lives. Families need authority in order to function. But when parents abdicate their authority, a vacuum results.
For many American parents, it is now easier to administer a pill prescribed by a board-certified physician than to firmly instruct a child and impose consequences for bad behavior.
The appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is for the parents to turn off the video-game console and turn out the lights so that the kid can get to sleep.
Based on my experience in the office, I believe that sleep deprivation is one reason why American kids today are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, compared with American kids three decades ago. And the failure of parents to assert their authority is a big part of the reason why American kids are getting less sleep than they used to.
about 103 out of every 1,000 American teenagers are now taking, or have taken, medications for ADHD.
I know an American family that spent several years living in England. They had one son, who was an average student: not great, but not terrible. When the family returned home to the United States, the parents enrolled him in the local public school. Mom was startled by the continual drumbeat from teachers and other parents: “Maybe your son has ADHD. Have you considered trying a medication?” She told me, “It was weird, like everybody was in on this conspiracy to medicate my son. In England, none of the kids is on medication. Or if they are, it’s a secret. But I really don’t think many are. Here
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As recently as 1979, the best estimate was that only about 1.2 percent of American kids—12 out of 1,000—had the condition we now call ADHD (then known as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”).22
The medications work. They do change the child’s behavior. That’s what I find so scary. These medications are being used as a means of behavior modification to an extent almost unimaginable outside North America.
The United States is an outlier among developed countries in the use of antipsychotics for children: American kids are about 8.7 times more likely to be on these medications compared with kids in Germany, 56 times more likely compared with kids in Norway, and about 93 times more likely compared with kids in Italy.30 The most dramatic and obvious side effects of the atypical antipsychotic medications are metabolic: kids who take these medications are much more likely to become obese and develop diabetes.
Aside from the serious side effects these medications can cause, I see a deeper problem: a shift of authority and responsibility away from the parents to the prescribing physician. When the child subsequently misbehaves, many parents say, “He can’t help it; he has ADHD / bipolar disorder / Autism Spectrum” (circle one).
When the teacher and the parents are confident of their authority, then bad behavior—whether in the form of throwing a temper tantrum, or making buzzing noises, or ignoring the teacher—can be recognized as what it is: namely, bad behavior, which signifies a loss of self-control on the part of the student. The teacher and parents can insist that the student show better self-control. When the teacher and parents exercise their authority, most students will develop better habits and show greater self-control, because the teacher and parents require it, because they expect it, and because the
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Recommendation #1: Command. Don’t ask. Don’t negotiate. Modern American parents are forever rationalizing their decisions to their children. There are many problems with that approach. The mere fact that the parent feels compelled to negotiate already undermines the authority of the parent. When you lay down a rule, and your children ask why, answer, “Because Mommy (or Daddy) says so, that’s why.” American parents two generations ago did this routinely and comfortably. Most British and Australian parents still do. American parents today—seldom.
A mother and father brought their 6-year-old daughter to see me. The child had a fever and a sore throat. I examined the ears, which were fine. I said, “Next I’m going to take a look at your throat.” But before I could look at the throat, mom asked, “Do you mind if the doctor looks in your throat for just a second, honey? Afterward we can go and get some ice cream.” The child paused, then burst into tears and said, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” What should have been a simple 2-second exam became a major ordeal lasting several minutes. In more than two decades of practice, I have learned
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Recommendation #2: Eat dinner with your kids. And no cell phones allowed, no TV in the background during dinner.
Every meal counts. In a recent survey of 26,078 Canadian adolescents from a wide range of backgrounds—urban and rural, affluent and low income—researchers asked each kid, “In the last seven days, how many days have you had a meal with a parent?” Kids who had more meals with parents were less likely to have “internalizing problems” such as feeling sad, anxious, or lonely. They were less likely to have “externalizing problems” such as fighting, skipping school, stealing, etc. They were more likely to help others and to report feeling satisfied with their own lives. The difference wasn’t just
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the family meal may be a marker for a constellation of behaviors that collectively predict good outcomes: behaviors such as limiting the amount of time watching TV or on the Internet, etc. The bottom line on family meals: • A family in which kids often have meals with parents is likely to be a family in which parents still have authority; a family in which parents and family interaction still matter. • But just insisting that everybody eat together, while the TV is blaring and the kids are texting at the dinner table, probably won’t accomplish much by itself.38
When family time is a top priority, parents are likely to have a better sense of what’s going on in their children’s lives.
Try to adopt the European mind-set with regard to medication for kids. That means viewing medication as an absolute last resort after every other possible intervention has been tried. In the United States, medication has become the first resort: “Let’s try it and see if it helps.”
In the United States, you will find kids in almost every classroom who disrespect the teacher or who are actively trying to undermine the teacher’s authority.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel told Fingleton that American innovation in the past two decades has been remarkably narrow, “confined largely to information technology and financial services.” For innovation in transportation, manufacturing, and even biotechnology, the leaders are now in Western Europe and Asia. Fingleton reports that “the evidence of international patent filings is looking increasingly ominous” for the United States.
Fingleton has found that American corporations are moving their R&D operations abroad. Fully 27 percent of all employees in US multinational corporations’ research departments were based abroad as of 2009, up from 16 percent in 2004.
The United States now ranks #11 in the world in the filing of international patents per capita, behind Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, South Korea, Sweden, and Switzerland.5
The golden era of creativity for young Americans was 1945 through 1970, when US students were much more likely to be respectful and deferential to teachers.
The silent majority6 of Americans during the 1960s stayed home, watching The Andy Griffith Show or Gidget.) The silver era of creativity spanned 1970 through 1995, when the attitude of American students toward teachers was still much more respectful than it is today. The marked rise of the culture of disrespect over the past two decades has actually been associated with a decline in American creativity.
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). First administered worldwide in 2000, the PISA test is offered every three years. Students take the PISA at 15 years of age.9 Within each participating country, schools are randomly chosen. The program has received wide praise for its thoroughness and its ability to test real understanding and creativity, not just rote mastery of facts. The PISA also has maintained a constancy of methods since its first administration in 2000, so it provides a consistent yardstick over time. As recently as 2000, when the PISA was first administered, the
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Ripley identifies three domains where she thinks the United States has gone wrong:
Overinvestment in technology:
Overemphasis on sports:
Low selectivity in teacher training:
Each of these factors is important. I would like to add one more: the culture of disrespect.
Ripley followed an American high school exchange student, Kim, who spent a year in Finland. At one point, Kim asked the Finnish students a question that had been on her mind: “Why do you guys care so much [about your education]?” The students in Finland were baffled by the question, “as if Kim had just asked them why they insisted on breathing so much. . . . Maybe the real mystery was not why Finnish kids cared so much, but why so many of her [American] classmates did not.”18
The solution is not to purchase more and more electronic gizmos and screens so that school comes to resemble a video-game arcade. The solution is to change and reorient the culture so that students are more concerned with pleasing the grown-ups than with looking cool in the eyes of their peers.
today, among adults 25 to 34 years of age, Americans have dropped to 15th place internationally in the proportion of young people who have earned college degrees.
there is new evidence that young Americans are studying less at college, and learning less at college, than they did a generation ago. Researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa studied a wide range of students who were tested during their first year at college and in their final year at college. They found that the typical American college student gains very little in terms of critical thinking ability between the beginning of the freshman year and the end of the senior year. Approximately one-third of students do not improve more than 1 point on a 100-point scale.
Many told the researchers some variation of “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Quite a few of the students interviewed by Arum and Roksa concluded that the main point of college is not academic learning at all but making the right social connections.22 Small wonder then that so many show little gains on measures of cognitive skill and reasoning.
American college students in the 1960s devoted an average of 25 hours per week to studying. By the early 2000s, the amount of time per week American college students spent studying had decreased to about 12 hours, roughly half the figure from the 1960s.23 American college students now spend less time studying than students in any European country with the sole exception of Slovakia.24
American parents used to be able to assume that their kids were getting a good education if the family lived in a good neighborhood with good schools and the child went on to attend a selective university. That assumption is no longer valid. As a result, you need to be more involved in your child’s education to ensure that your child gets an education that measures up, not to American norms, which are now mediocre among developed nations, but to international norms. In kindergarten, in high school, and beyond.
Many college faculty and staff report a noticeable fragility among today’s students. Some describe them as “teacups”—beautiful, but liable to break with the slightest drop. —Jean Twenge, San Diego State University1
“So what led you to suggest that Aaron should try playing football?” I asked Aaron’s father, Steve. “Actually it was the nurse practitioner at the pediatrician’s office who first brought it up. She showed us how his weight percentile was climbing but his height percentile wasn’t changing. I remember I asked her, ‘What are you trying to tell us?’ And she said, ‘Aaron is getting overweight.’ She didn’t mention football per se. She just said that Aaron needed to be more active, and she suggested after-school sports. Football was my idea.
“Physics was way harder than she expected it to be. She had never really had any serious difficulty in school before. Everything always came easily to her. Physics was the first subject where she just didn’t understand the concepts the first time around.”
fragility.
It doesn’t take much for them to give up and retreat, as Aaron did, or to fall apart, as Julia did.
Fragility has become a characteristic of American children and teenagers to an extent unknown 25 years ago.
The first and most obvious evidence is the extraordinary rise in the proportion of young Americans diagnosed and treated today for anxiety and depression.
In Aaron’s story, the end result is a young man who has retreated from the real world into his bedroom in order to play video games. I have seen the same process in young adults—more often young men than young women—who come home from college, or drop out of college, to retreat into the bedroom with a computer screen or a video game. That’s often the final common pathway which I have observed in twenty-somethings: young people whose dreams don’t come true, who then give up, retreat, and return home to live with their parents or (if their parents have the means) live separately from their
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The phenomenon of young, able-bodied adults not working and not looking for work is becoming much more common in the United States. As recently as 2000, it was rare in this country compared to other countries. In 2000, young Americans led the world in the proportion of young people who were creating new businesses and who were either working or looking for work,
