Our government goes to great lengths to criminalize our children for smoking pot, and parents fear like the plague the hint of any drug use by our children.
Yet, our schools and many parents eagerly administer drugs our children don’t need and that can put our children at risk for the rest of their lives.
You may have been told your son or daughter fidgets in class, is not focusing on a lesson, is easily distracted, and doesn’t get along with the other children. Some adults forget how they behaved when they were youngsters. We may overlook the fact that some children in a crowded class don’t get it, can’t keep up, and that’s why they may appear “distracted.” We also have those children who “got it” several grade levels earlier; they are bored. Alice Munro, in a short story, “Amundsen,” described a teacher who anticipated childish excess by this prescription, “Games okay but watch for over excitement …” She said the challenge of her fictionalized classroom was finding the happy medium, to “keep between stress and boredom.” We have children in school coming from difficult or broken homes, perhaps with ill siblings or relatives, maybe wrestling with a parents’ divorce. These stress factors affect how these children fail to cope in school and elsewhere.