Читать книгу 50 Miles - Sheryl St. Germain - Страница 13

Do No Harm

That’s our discipline style. A paddle is part of a principal’s toolbox. If we remove that tool, we may open a can of worms that cannot be closed.

—Ron Price, Dallas Independent School District trustee

The week before my son started kindergarten, I trimmed the long hair tail I’d let him grow. He hadn’t wanted me to trim it because, he said, if it got long enough, he’d become a lady, which seemed sort of cool to him at the time. It was 1989, and we were living in Dallas, Texas. A photograph taken on his first day of school shows him wearing a new Batman sweatshirt, stonewashed jeans, and new sneakers. He’s standing in front of his new school, Lakewood Elementary, holding a purple lunch box and smiling brightly. His blonde hair, tail-less, is neatly combed to the side. It’s one of the saddest photographs I own. He’s happy, naïve, full of promise, and his future seems as unmarred as the cloudless August morning. I was excited that first day too. All the hustle and bustle, all the children in their new clothes, all the hopeful faces of the parents mirroring my own. The new cars and well-dressed moms and dads dropping off their well-dressed kids impressed me. For the last three years, I’d been divorced from Gray’s father, putting myself through graduate school, and Gray and I had been living just above the poverty line. Now I had a part-time teaching job and two roommates to help with the rent. For the first time since we’d left his father, Gray and I were living in a “good” neighborhood.

He came home from school that first week quiet; I couldn’t get him to talk much about how things were going. On Friday morning, though, when I woke him, he rubbed his eyes and said, “Today is tomorrow, Mommy.”

“What do you mean, sweetie? Today is today. It’s Friday, a school day.”

“No, it’s Saturday. I don’t have to go to school today,” he said, pulling the covers over his head.

After some cajoling and threatening, I got him out of bed and to school on time, but since I’m an educator myself, I was disappointed that he seemed already disenchanted with school. That night, he had a series of nightmares, one about a two-foot long scorpion, another about a kidnapper who could take his head off and put it back on, and the last involving his teacher, who appeared as a witch with a magic diamond that made kids look ugly. He slept with me that night.

Monday afternoon, one week into the term, I discovered a note from the principal in Gray’s book bag. At the top was the Dallas Independent School District letterhead. Below, the principal had handwritten:

Parents of Gray Gideon:

Please see me as soon as possible about several problems that Gray is having at school. His teacher is having problems with him, and I have had to correct Gray many times during and after lunch.

Larry Williams, Principal

After dropping Gray off the next morning, I met with the principal in his office. He was a short, plump man, balding and ruddy-cheeked, who spoke with a heavy Texas accent. He looked me square in the face.

“I’ll get right to the point, Mrs. Gideon. Your son has Attention Deficit Disorder. He needs to be put on Ritalin.”

To say I was stunned at the abruptness of his pronouncement would be an understatement.

“It’s St. Germain, not Gideon,” I said. “And you know this after one week with my son?”

He gave me a patronizing look and proceeded to explain. He noted not only Gray’s fidgetiness and inability to sit still, but that he had trouble getting started on projects and trouble finishing them. He seemed to be “out in space” somewhere when the teacher gave orders or assignments. He couldn’t remember much of anything, his teacher Mrs. Merkin had said. Whenever he had to go somewhere, whether it was to the bathroom or outside for recess, he ran. Sometimes, the principal said, he even ran in the classroom from one side to the other. These, he said, were symptoms of ADD¹ children—restlessness, hyper-activity, inability to concentrate for long periods of time, and so on. He told me he had written his dissertation on ADD, which was why he could recognize it so quickly. ADD children, if not treated, he said, tended to fall behind and become under-achievers. Some of them, he said, never finished school and had trouble making friends all of their lives.

“Mrs. Merkin has had to send Gray in here to talk with me every day because he won’t sit still and can’t pay attention. He’s distracting the other students and interfering with their ability to learn.”

“Every day?”

“Every day. And this can’t go on.”

“But this is just kindergarten. It’s the first time he’s had to sit still. Why can’t the teacher handle this herself?”

“Kindergarten is an important time for children, Mrs. Gideon. It prepares them for the challenges ahead. The teacher can’t take so much time on one child. It’s better to nip this in the bud now.”

I left his office furious. Of course I knew about ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder); I’d read articles in the newspapers and magazines about how it was being over-diagnosed in young children, mostly boys, and how Ritalin was a stimulant often used treat it. ADD was associated with hyperactivity, but its major symptoms were inattention and impulsivity. Tears sprung, unbidden. I didn’t want to drug Gray. The thought of it made me ill, but I wondered what would happen if we fought the principal’s recommendation. I felt thrust into a harsh world I didn’t understand, and for the first time in my life, I had no clue what the right path might be. It seemed to me that, once taken, the path of drugs would be one from which it would be hard to turn back.

Psychostimulants were first administered to children in 1937, although the first FDA-approved use of Ritalin (methylphenidate) for children was in 1961. Methylphenidate, classified in the same category as cocaine and methamphetamine, is a stimulant some doctors argue is addicting. For years, it has been abused on the streets, sometimes crushed and snorted, other times injected. Like cocaine, it’s a powerful, mind-altering drug. During the 1990’s, the use of Ritalin or other stimulants to control children’s behavior increased more than seven hundred percent in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the number of children on medication for ADD has risen from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2014.

Retired deputy assistant administrator of the DEA Gene Haislip commented that America has become the only country in the world whose children are prescribed such a vast quantity of stimulants that share the same properties as cocaine. The United States uses about eighty-five percent of the world’s Ritalin.

When I thought of Gray, I thought of exuberance, ebullience. His face was always radiant with emotion, and he was literally filled with energy, curiosity and enthusiasm for everything. Tickled by some event or other, he would sometimes throw his body recklessly through the air and onto his bed, ripped through with laughter. He would be unaware of the room, or of me, only attentive to the absurd thing that had made him laugh, and the hole of laughter into which he’d fallen. He was so animated, so full of ideas and questions, and already adamant in his opinions. What would this child be like on Ritalin?

I thought of Where the Wild Things Are, the Caldecott Medal-winning book by Maurice Sendak, which I read to Gray probably once a week. Everything about the protagonist, Max, the child in wolf’s clothing—his truculent and defiant nature, his “wildness,” his imagination, his restless body and spirit—reminded me of Gray. What kind of culture did I live in, where the same qualities that were admired and celebrated in a book were labeled as a disorder in the schools?

I could feel myself becoming stubborn, digging in against the principal’s recommendation, though I had little but intuition to support my yet unshaped feelings. It did seem, however, that drugs should be the last recourse, not the first. The accusation that Gray was inattentive baffled me; he had never been inattentive at home. He loved being read to, and he paid attention even when the books we read were long and didn’t have many pictures. He loved playing with his toys, certainly showing great attention there. True, I sometimes had to tell him several times to do something, and he was occasionally defiant, but that seemed to me healthy, a sort of testing of boundaries and limits that needn’t be pathologized. I was angry, though I couldn’t say at whom or what.

The way Ritalin was explained to parents in those days was a little like the way God is explained to young children: it’s a mystery in which you must have faith. Ritalin, doctors told us, was a stimulant that, on children, had the opposite effect. It somehow calmed them down instead of speeding them up. I could not wrap my head around the paradox that a stimulant could act as a sedative. We now know that Ritalin does not have a paradoxical effect on children; it affects them exactly as it affects adults, as a stimulant. Like methadone, it provides a substitute “high”; the stimulation is drug-produced so that kids don’t search for stimulation in the real world. According to Lawrence Diller, author of Running on Ritalin, what observers mistake for calm is intensified focus.

We weren’t doing our jobs as parents, the principal said, if we didn’t put Gray on Ritalin. In subsequent conversations, the principal continually emphasized that the consequences of not putting Gray on Ritalin were school failure such that he would eventually drop out, depression, conduct disorder, failed relationships, underachievement in the workplace, and substance abuse.

I decided, however, to resist the principal’s suggestion that we put Gray on Ritalin. I came from a family that had a history of substance abuse, and I did not wish to set my son on the road to drug use as a way to control his behavior. I had escaped the fate of many in my family, and would do everything in my power to help my son escape. Sanctioned or not, Ritalin had the same effects as cocaine, effects I knew well.

Before I left the principal’s office, I informed him I’d consider what he had said, but that either way I was going to sit in on Gray’s class. I also called Gray’s father and explained to him what the principal had said. We had a long conversation in which we agreed to try to make the environments at each house more similar, to have the same rules, the same consequences for breaking the rules, and make sure he was eating balanced meals at regular intervals at both homes. Consistency, we decided, was key.

I attended Gray’s kindergarten class the following Tuesday. I wanted Mrs. Merkin to forget I was there, so I brought some papers to grade, and since I myself didn’t teach on Tuesdays, I settled in for the whole day.

Mrs. Merkin was in her mid-twenties and could not have been teaching for very long. The class was large, with almost thirty students, and she clearly did not have the skills to manage such a crowded class. During the morning period, she constantly sent children—always boys—to the principal’s office, sometimes for minor infractions. Gray did not get into trouble that day (he was acutely aware that I was there), but I watched with interest as one little boy who, during a long period of coloring, decided to finish coloring standing up, was dressed down by Mrs. Merkin. She insisted he sit down to finish the coloring. Each time she turned around, he stood up again, still coloring, but standing and bending over the table. She’d run back to the table, order him to sit down, and the cycle would repeat. By the end of it, she was shrieking, the boy was sobbing, and she had grabbed him roughly by his collar and dragged him out the door and into the principal’s office. I was flabbergasted. If she acted this way while a parent was watching, I wondered what went on with no parent present.

Anything Mrs. Merkin taught, she taught by rote. There was no spark, no enthusiasm in her. She read the most mundane, simplistic stories to the kids in a monotonous, singsong voice. I read to Gray every night: The Odyssey, Watership Down, The Hobbit. He already knew most of his letters and could recognize many words. She was boring, the class was boring, and I didn’t blame Gray for acting out. Not only that, but she was inflexibly authoritarian, and I could see why Gray might buck against her rigid rules. Students had to sit utterly still almost every moment they were in the classroom, and then they had to lie still for forty-five minutes of “quiet time,” during which they couldn’t even look at picture books. Students were not allowed to talk during lunch either. I found this last an unbelievably harsh rule, but she defended it by saying that if they allowed the students to talk, they wouldn’t finish their meals on time. And who knows what unholy chaos would break out if they didn’t finish their meals on time?

If, as some contemporary researchers have suggested, ADD-diagnosed kids are addicted to sensory stimulation, being unable to engage with each other during lunchtime and then being forced to lie down for forty-five minutes with no stimulation must be torturous. Even if one doesn’t buy the theory that they are addicted to sensory stimulation, it’s unreasonable to expect that five-year-olds might willingly sit still during the whole of class with one recess break of fifteen minutes, have lunch where they can’t socialize, and be forced to lie still or take a forced nap for another forty-five minutes. It occurred to me after just one day in Gray’s class that not only does the traditional public-school structure privilege docile, obedient personalities, but for some children it constitutes a very real form of torture, all the worse because it’s sanctioned by those who most care about the children.

Later that evening, I asked Gray what he thought of Mrs. Merkin.

“She’s stupid!”

I didn’t say anything, although I actually agreed with him.

“She doesn’t even know how to pronounce some things. And she keeps calling me Greg.”

After a week of sitting in Mrs. Merkin’s class, I demanded that Gray be switched to another teacher. The principal said they didn’t usually switch teachers, but I was adamant, and eventually he gave in. Gray was put into a more seasoned teacher’s class, Mrs. Snyder’s class. I sat in the first day of class with her, too, and could see she was a bit more effective than Mrs. Merkin. She didn’t constantly send kids to the principal’s office but rather tried to handle infractions herself.

Things were okay for a little while, then Gray started to get in trouble again – notes were being sent home about him being fidgety and not paying attention. I began speaking with Mrs. Snyder several times a week, but nothing either of us did helped. Soon I got another call from the principal to meet with him.

The night before we were to meet, I read Gray another chapter of The Hobbit and snuggled in bed next to him. He was holding one of the stuffed animals he’d had since birth, the one we called “heart bear” because a red heart was stitched to its chest. I stroked his hair.

“How are you liking school these days?” I asked.

He looked at me with his startling gray eyes, which began to fill with tears. Then he looked at his bear, and when he spoke, it seemed as if he were speaking to the bear, not me.

“I wish there was a world where principals didn’t beat children,” he said.

It turned out that during many of those visits to the principal’s office, the principal had been beating Gray with a paddle he kept in his desk drawer. I learned, to my surprise, that corporal punishment was legal in Texas. School officials did not need the approval of the parent to hit a child, nor did they have to inform the parents. Furious, frustrated, and emotionally bereft, I reminded myself we were in the middle of the Bible Belt, where many believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, but that didn’t help much. The week before, the Dallas Morning News had published an article about the use of corporal punishment in schools. The principal of a Texas Christian elementary school had been quoted as saying, “We should be passing bills to encourage corporal punishment.”

The next morning, I marched into the principal’s office determined to let him have it. He motioned me to sit down and pulled the paddle out of his drawer. Years later, Gray would say to me, “Do you remember that principal who beat me? Did you know his paddle had pictures of the Smurfs on it? Isn’t that sick?”

In that moment, I didn’t notice the images on the paddle. As the principal stroked it, I only registered that it was painted bright enamel blue and peppered with brightly colored stickers.

“You have to understand, Mrs. Gideon, that if you refuse to have Gray tested for ADD, we have to take other measures.” He paused. “You know, one problem with Gray is that he’s not afraid.”

“What do you mean he’s not afraid?”

“He’s not afraid. He comes in here, knowing he’s going to be paddled, and he stands there, defiant, and refuses to apologize or promise that he won’t misbehave.” The principal tapped the paddle against the palm of his hand, thinking.

“He’s only five years old!”

“Why do you think he’s not afraid, Mrs. Gideon?”

“St. Germain, Sheryl St. Germain, I don’t have Gray’s dad’s last name. Please don’t call me that again. And I guess he’s not afraid because he’s never had to be afraid.”

“Don’t you discipline him at home?”

“He has to do quiet time when he does something wrong.”

“Does that work?”

“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“What about your husband?”

“What about my husband?” I felt like he was speaking a foreign language.

“Does he discipline your son?”

“We both do quiet time. We try to be consistent.” Instead of building up to tell the principal off, I was weakening. I could feel myself becoming emotional, and I knew that if I didn’t get out of there soon, I was going to cry. I couldn’t bear the thought of this man hitting my son, however sanctioned it might be.

“Well,” he said, “once you get him on Ritalin, I’m sure he’ll be in here less often. It really does help, you know. The teachers like it. It helps them do their job and keep order in the classroom. And Gray will find that he’s better able to make friends too. Right now, I don’t think too many of his classmates want to hang around him because he’s always getting in trouble.”

“But this is just kindergarten!” I said. I was beginning to feel like I was in a Kafka novel. Nothing made sense. “I thought kids just colored and hung out and got used to each other in kindergarten. Since when did it become like the army?”

I felt like I was suffocating. I left the principal’s office and drove around and around the neighborhood, looking at the homes of the parents and children who went to Gray’s school. I had never noticed how neatly clipped and submissive their hedges looked, how their trees were pruned until they looked like spiritless soldiers. I wondered if the children playing in the yards were well-beaten children. I had thought I’d done the right thing trying to move into what was supposed to be a good school district, but now I was confused. Had I done the right thing? Why hadn’t I told the principal never to touch my son again? What kind of wimp was I? Was I so unsure of my own methods? I had to conclude that I was. What did I know about raising kids? Gray was my only child.

I remembered the beatings my father used to give us. His belt always hung on the back of his easy chair, and if we did anything wrong, we would “get the belt.” I remember being whipped so hard my thighs blistered. I don’t remember it ever changing anything, but I do remember it making me mad, then humiliated, and then I’d cry and my father would eventually stop. He was usually measured when he meted out punishment to the girls, but my brothers really got it, especially Jay, who was always in trouble, and who wound up dropping out of school, going to prison, and dying in his early twenties of a drug overdose. He got a lot of beatings, and my father would sometimes go into a rage when he beat him. Sometimes he was drunk, my father, and the beatings would last longer, though they’d be sloppier. Jay and Gray shared enough traits—asthma, defiance, trouble with authority, problems attending and organizing—that I was already beginning to worry that Gray might share Jay’s fate. Jay would surely have been diagnosed with ADD had he been born a generation later. Would Ritalin have saved him? Repeated beatings surely had not.

I imagined the principal beating Gray. I imagined what Gray must have been feeling. Rivers rising in him, flooding, unchecked, something in him drowning. The principal saying he needs to learn fear. My father beating and beating my brother, throwing him up, down, against the door. For each demerit a beating, my brother not giving in, not hitting back, not crying in front of anyone. Like my son, maybe, the welts rising in his heart, his guts twisting and weeping.

Over the next weeks, I spent several nights sleepless, the principal’s words and his twangy Texas accent infecting every conscious moment: You have to understand that if you refuse to have Gray tested for ADD, we have to take other measures. So, were these my options? Drug him or beat him? Suddenly, Ritalin didn’t seem like such a bad choice.

Corporal punishment is a time-honored and traditional method of discipline in American schools. Historically, it was seen as a method of literally “beating the devil” out of misbehaving children. Learning theorists, however, argue that punishment as a means of behavior control is complex, and that it can accelerate or retard performance of some behavior. A child can habituate to punishment and, if beaten enough, become a psychopath. Every study I could find on corporal punishment suggested it led to violence and aggression rather than self-discipline. It made tragic sense to me that Texas, the state with the worst record for the death penalty, would also be the leading practitioner of corporal punishment in the schools.

In 1999, almost 74,000 of Texas’s 3.9 million students were paddled. About eighty-three percent were boys, according to a U.S. Department of Education survey. (Unsurprisingly, the percentage of boys versus girls diagnosed with ADD is around the same.) In 1989, the year Gray started kindergarten, Texas was one of very few states that had no procedural requirements for corporal punishment. Teachers needn’t have approval of the principal; the punishment did not have to take place in the presence of another adult, or without undue anger. It did not have to be reasonable, nor did the punishers have to have approval from the parents. School officials could strike on the head and face, and there was no restriction against deadly force. It could even take place in presence of other students.

Most researchers agree that corporal punishment often appears to result in the temporary reduction of undesirable behavior, and in this it is not unlike Ritalin. To be effective in the long run, however, the punishment must be extremely harsh and repeated—and even then, the results are inconclusive. In an essay about the link between corporal punishment and delinquency, Ralph Welsh writes that no recidivist male delinquent existed who had never been exposed to corporal punishment, be it a belt, a board, an extension cord, or a fist.

As late as 1994, almost all the southern states still allowed corporal punishment in their schools. When George W. Bush ran for president, he won electoral college votes from nineteen of the twenty-two states that allow corporal punishment, a figure so stark, some extremists were moved to call him “the president with the child-beating mandate.” Although, to my knowledge, former President Bush has not spoken out in favor of corporal punishment, his education bill included the Teacher Protection Act, a provision to protect principals and other school officials from lawsuits by parents of beaten children. (This provision was removed from the bill by members of his own party.) As governor of Texas during Gray’s childhood, Governor Bush also signed more death warrants than any other living government official.

Today, thirty-one states have banned corporal punishment. Texas is among nineteen states where it remains legal, leaving it up to individual school districts to determine whether students may be struck. In August 2003, under increasing pressure from its community after information regarding several injuries students sustained from corporal punishment, the Dallas Independent School District revised its corporal punishment policy, stopping short of prohibiting paddling. School authorities may still paddle, but they must have a written request from the parents that this method of discipline be used.

I met again with Gray’s principal and requested that he not paddle Gray. I continued to sit in on his classroom a few times a month, with increasing despair. Even though Mrs. Snyder was a more seasoned teacher, little meaningful one-on-one interaction occurred with students. The classroom was too big for any kind of learning except rote. Students were rushed from one subject to another; never was there a sense of completion or interconnectedness. It was incredibly tedious, and I could see how bright students might come to see school as a boring, essentially meaningless activity. Surely it was not the same at a private school, I began to think, but when Gray’s father and I investigated the private schools in Dallas, our hearts sank. There was no way we could afford them.

I remembered my mother wringing her hands in despair at my brother’s funeral, crazed with grief, saying over and over, “His kindergarten class was too large, the teacher had a nervous breakdown, he needed more attention ….” She believed then, and still believes to this day, that my brother’s subsequent problems, and his eventual tragic death, could be traced back to that kindergarten class, which had been too large. Psychologists would consider her analysis of the situation utterly simplistic, and yet—if the child’s first experience with formal education, which will take up such a large portion of his or her formative years, is unrelentingly negative, it will surely take a tremendous effort on the part of overworked teachers and harried and often untrained parents to change that impression.

When I think of a tiny five-year-old—Gray was always the smallest child in his class, and even now, at twenty-nine, is only five foot six—going up against a heavy-set authoritarian principal with a paddle, an instrument Gray had never seen, I am cut to the core.

Gray must have been shamed by the sessions with the principal, else he would have told me about them earlier. What choices did he have, as a child, in response to these beatings? Accept and acquiesce, or defy and be beaten. He chose the latter as a five-year-old, and it was a choice he would make continually for the next fifteen years in repeated conflicts with authority figures. In my most painful confrontations with Gray in his teen years, however, when I caught his eyes, I always saw the eyes of a spunky five-year-old. They were the eyes of a five-year-old confronting a hulking principal with a paddle, a five-year-old confronting an adult who wants to beat fear into him, a five-year-old confronting a version of his nightmare-witch with the magic diamond that makes kids look ugly.

We managed to squeeze Gray through kindergarten without Ritalin, but promised the school we would consider trying it before he started first grade. Gray’s pediatrician also thought it worth trying. “You can always stop it if you don’t like what it does to him, Sheryl. It really does help a lot of kids,” he said. By this time, Gray was seeing a counselor who also believed in the value of Ritalin.

It was hard to continue to fight the school, the doctors, and Gray’s dad, who was beginning to lean on me. The principal had threatened to go back to the paddling if Gray’s behavior didn’t improve, hinting that, legally, he did not need my permission to paddle him.

Gray continued to have problems in school, and needed a lot of support from the teachers, his father, and me to complete school projects. Yet his grades were good. In Pre-reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science, and Art he got straight E’s throughout the year. Under “Personal and Social Development,” however, he got an X (the equivalent of an F) in “follows directions,” “completes assigned tasks,” “works well with others,” and “exhibits self-control.” He got an X in “makes good use of time.”

Eventually, I caved. I caved to the pressure from the school, the doctors, and Gray’s father, and I agreed to put Gray on Ritalin when he turned seven.

As far as I know, the principal never beat him again.

Gray would remain on Ritalin or some substitute—in later years it was Adderall—for at least twelve years, during which period he continued to have problems with friendships, his grades deteriorated, and he developed more strongly defiant behavior at school. In high school, he was suspended several times for his insolence toward the teachers, and he was arrested a few times for minor offenses. Eventually, he stopped going to classes and had to go to court on several occasions for truancy. He dropped out of high school at sixteen, still taking psycho-stimulants. Although he managed to get a GED and make it through half a semester of college with Adderall, he began to abuse that drug, as many do, and I wound up having to commit him for drug abuse when he was nineteen. In later years, he would convince doctors to give him other versions of stimulants such as Concerta, Focalin, and Vyvanse. He would graduate to meth and even heroin. At this writing, he has just completed thirty days of rehab.

I don’t know how much effect the years of taking stimulants will ultimately have on Gray’s life. It was moderately useful in the early years, ineffective in the teen years, and overall, does not appear to have had the promised positive effects. I sometimes fear that his natural impulsivity, creativity, and spontaneity were squelched during those years he was on stimulants, and maybe those years of squelching contributed to the strong feelings in him that are sometimes manifested as anger. It’s as if the drug managed to hold back those waters for a time, but now all the floodgates are open, and all hell has burst loose.

All the things the principal and ADD literature claimed would be the consequences of not putting Gray on Ritalin—school failure such that he would eventually drop out, depression, conduct disorder, failed relationships, under-achievement in the workplace, and substance abuse—have occurred anyway, despite the use of stimulants. I asked him recently about his use of drugs and alcohol to control his moods, and he said that he learned as a child that the way the culture wanted him to control his moods was with a pill, so he never learned to develop the life skills he needed to manage his emotions.

Gray still struggles with the same issues he struggled with in kindergarten. And yet. My son is one of the smartest persons I have ever known. He has more natural intelligence than many of my PhD-educated colleagues. He is a talented musician, poet, and social critic. He is witty and has a great sense of humor. But he is a failure in the eyes of American society.

Life is messy. I’ve focused exclusively on one thread of that mess here: the negative effects of a broken school system. Of course, other crucial strands, both environmental and cultural, affected Gray’s life. Kids like Gray often have behavior problems that have little to do with those behavior clusters psychologists label as ADD. Genes and culture figure into the mix, parenting styles as well as the style of authority and learning in the schools.

Perhaps most importantly, though, schools have failed to understand how radically different this generation is from those that preceded it, and how the popular American culture that bred and nurtured Gray’s generation had a tremendous influence on their ability to attend as well as their capacity for defiance.

Gray’s generation, often called Millennials, was the first generation to be inundated with a fast-moving popular culture—including video games, MTV, and web surfing—that created and then nurtured a kind of aesthetics of movement. Popular media breastfed these kids on montage, breakneck speed images, and fractured narratives. Most experienced changing landscapes in more personal ways as well, as a large percent of them came from single parent families where partners came and went, and actual physical movement, from house to house if not from state to state, was the norm. This was certainly the case with Gray. I left his father when he was eighteen months old, and we moved every few years after that in search of a better job or neighborhood.

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.