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The American Academy of Pediatrics came out with new guidelines for the diagnosis of ADHD in children. The age of diagnosis has been changed to 4 - 18 years old with the previous age guidelines of 6 - 12.
Some of the numbers are as follows:
Approximately 8 - 12% of children are diagnosed with ADHD
As of 2007 there are 2.7 million children between 4 - 17 are taking medication for ADHD
Pharmacology business to treat ADHD is a 3.4 billion a year industry as of 2008 with an increase to 4 billion expected this year.
We now have television advertisements, in prime time on networks marketed to families and children, by drug companies for medication to treat ADHD.
The reported hope of the American Academy of Pediatrics is that the change in guidelines will lead to earlier intervention for children with ADHD.
The awareness that children are emotional beings is a good thing as is attending to their emotional needs. My concern is that due to the fact that we are a society that medicates at every turn we will simply chose to medicate emotions rather than seek to understand the message that those emotions convey.
Each infant is born with a given emotional hum. I say given in that this hum is part hereditary and part influenced by the mothers issues (both biological & emotional) while carrying the child. So, this infant emerges into the world with their unique hum. The infant's hum then affects the parenting they receive and the interaction and shaping begins. Shaping of both infant and parent.
In future writing I will delve more into the hum, how it affects both parent and child.
But suffice it to say that the infant's hum affects their ability to navigate in the world of adults. It is the case that some infants face issues of great complexity that need and benefit from intervention. And that these infants turn into children that have complex issues that need a team approach to manage.
That said, I am greatly concerned about the slippery slope that we may find ourselves sliding down as we seek to identify more children with what we call ADHD. We are a society under massive amounts of stress and our children are very much aware of and experience this stress. When parents and teachers are stressed they are unable to effectively sooth a worried child. And when you combine a child who may have a high hum of anxiety with a family and society in stress the result is a child who acts out. When this is further combined with a society that readily turns to medication we end up with children that are medicated.
When we as a society and a culture have high numbers of children on medication for acting on anxiety then we need to take another look at ourselves.
