![]() If they don’t, we are quick to diagnose them with ADHD.Īccording to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percent of very young children (ages two to five) who were diagnosed with ADHD increased by over 50 percent between 012. Yet we expect five- and six-year-old children to sit still and pay attention in classrooms and contain their curiosity. Their natural curiosity leads them to blurt out questions, oblivious in their excitement to interrupting others. They are impulsive, physically active, have trouble sitting still, and don’t pay attention for very long. In a Time Magazine article called “The ADHD Fallacy,” she writes:īy nature, young children have a lot of energy. Marilyn Wedge, author of A Disease Called Childhood: Why ADHD Became An American Epidemic, sounds the alarm on ADHD overdiagnosis. Immaturity, not pathology, was the real factor. In states with a September 1 school enrollment age cutoff, children who entered school after just turning five in August were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children born in September who were about to turn six. Last fall, Harvard researchers found that early school enrollment was linked to significantly higher rates of ADHD diagnosis. The youngest children are the ones most often caught in the ADHD medical dragnet. They are responding to national curriculum frameworks and standardized testing requirements that over the past two decades have made schooling more oppressive-particularly for young children. The youngest children are the ones most often caught in the ADHD medical dragnet.Now, 80 percent of teachers expect children to learn to read in kindergarten. When many of us were kids, kindergarten was mellow, playful, and short with few academic expectations. They are playing less and expected to do more at very young ages. Over the last several decades, young people are spending more time in school and school-like activities than ever before. More research points to schooling, particularly early schooling, as a primary culprit in the ADHD diagnosis epidemic. ![]() While ADHD may be a real and debilitating ailment for some, the startling upsurge in school-age children being labeled with and medicated for this disorder suggests that something else could be to blame. Today, children with these characteristics are being diagnosed with, and often medicated for, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at an astonishing rate. High energy, lack of impulse control, inability to sit still and listen, lack of organizational skills, fidgeting, talking incessantly-these typical childhood qualities were widely tolerated until relatively recently. Behaviors that were once accepted as normal, even if mildly irritating to adults, are increasingly viewed as unacceptable and cause for medical intervention.
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