Cultural Tempo: Rotary phones have been discarded because they are too slow and single-lever faucets are used to speed up the mixing of hot and cold water. In America in 1971, one in five adults surveyed said they felt rushed "always"; in 1992, it was one in three. This tempo inevitably impacts our children.

Today's child has become the unwilling, unintended, victim of overwhelming stress—the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social changes and constantly rising expectations. —David Elkind, PhD

In addition to the fact that adults simply don't have time for their children, our culture may be producing a whole new generation of "short-attention-span" children whose thinking is no longer based on one-step-at-a-time thinking but on instantaneous flashes of immediate sensory data. Today's fast-paced media shower children with a non-stop rapid succession of images and information bits. Many children have evolved attentional strategies based on scanning, grasping information in quick and rapid chunks. What is considered a disorder may be, for some children at least, an entirely normal and healthy response to a faster cultural tempo.

Our society-wide rush to more, and faster, stimulation leaves children especially vulnerable to "sensory addictions." Today's children experience many more stimuli than those of any preceding generation and, as a result, are motivated to engage in more and more stimulus-seeking behavior. In a sense, they become "addicted" to and dependent on continuous sensory stimulation.

The symptoms of ADD may reflect a kind of escape behavior used by the child to maintain sensory stimulation: Ritalin works by providing pharmacological stimulation.

Societal Breakdown: If we care about our children, we cannot underestimate nor dismiss the tremendous impact of prevailing societal pressures as "the way it is."

Societal stressors range from unparalleled levels of sensory bombardment to terrifying and violent "entertainment" (even the most-loved and "harmless" children's movies, such as Bambi, The Wizard of Oz and E.T. can cause a stress reaction that can last months or years), poverty, racism, threat of terrorism, unsafe communities, and exposure to violence. High levels of reactivity, agitation, and restlessness can hardly be called an "unnatural response," and the solution cannot be found in a drug.

Lack of Meaning: A largely ignored but highly significant stressor is the fact that our society fails to provide many children with a coherent, life-affirming philosophy/worldview.

No society in the world has tried to raise children without providing them with a moral and spiritual grounding in their culture, and a worldview usually including values about honesty, courage, and a belief in something greater than themselves. When life no longer has any meaning, children and adults become severely demoralized and vulnerable to emotional collapse... —Peter R. Breggin, MD

They become caught in the superficial—and soul destroying—materialist values that surround them. We question why?

Social Control: Is it possible that society has actually invented, and perpetuates, the myth of ADD to help preserve its social order? We live in an authoritarian/dominator culture, with a strong work ethic. Control, conformity, and competition are valued over creativity, compassion, and collaboration (and strongly reinforced by many popular parenting styles, the educational system, and major social and political institutions of our culture). Where there are dominators, there must be the dominated. Hence, it could be argued that ADD-type behaviors challenge the values of the dominant culture, and so must be repressed.

In summary, our children may be hyperactive and inattentive for a whole host of valid reasons—biological, psychological, educational, and socio/cultural. Children (and adults!) in situations they perceive as stressful, often react with scattered attention, "climbing the walls" and fighting. To claim such behavior is a medical disorder is astounding, given the mountain of clinical and research evidence that confirms the devastating impact of each and every of the above stressors on the wellbeing of children.

Identifying children who are at risk is an easy matter: All of our children are at risk. They are endangered by a plethora of stressors... no [one] can afford to assume that one or other child is invulnerable. Does it do us any good to accept that all of our children are at risk? It does. It allows us to put the focus where it belongs: on ourselves, our families, and our communities—on the life conditions we have created around us for our children.
By focusing on ourselves, we empower ourselves to find new ways to identify and to meet the needs of our children. —Peter R. Breggin, MD

Meanwhile, only two treatments are consistently recommended by ADD experts: medication and behavior modification.

Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the A.D.D. Child
Peter R. Breggin, Reclaiming Our Children
David Elkind, The Hurried Child*
Richard J. DeGrandpre, Ritalin Nation: Rapid Fire Culture and Transformation of Human Consciousness

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