Ritalin Delusions: Kids, Medication and the Death of the American Family

 

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

 

I recently read a disturbing article in “Books and Culture: a Christian Review”. In it the author, Jean Bethke Elshtain, herself quotes an edition of the New York Times from last year which “informs us of the startling and alarming fact that the use of antipsychotics by young people in the United States rose fivefold in one decade”. While I was aware that more American children than ever were being prescribed behavioral-modification drugs I had no idea that the practice had so mushroomed over the past ten years; “startling and alarming” indeed. Whether it is for Attention Deficit Disorder, mood swings or violent conduct millions of kids are daily swallowing pills designed to address emotional and psychological issues, sometimes taking up to three or four such medications at a time.

 

Elshtain zeroes in on one of the reasons such “pacifying” drugs are being requested by parents in the U.S. and that is the fact that ambitious mothers and fathers who work long hours are spending less and less “quality time” with their children. These kids are often benefactors of the material riches such workaholism makes possible. What they do not benefit from is the sacrificial love that is an absolute requirement of good parenting, and this is resulting in a myriad of disorders.

 

The fact is the very term “disorder” is being used as valuable cover for people who want to believe the problem lies in their child’s physiology rather then in neglectful parenting. Pharmaceutical companies and some doctors are happy to go along with this charade. Moral absolution is followed by a prescription and another son or daughter is placed on a medication or medications with what Elshtain accurately describes as “deleterious side-effects”. She also goes on to point out that these drug’s long-term effects are unknown.

 

One explanation for this trend is not greatly explored by the author and desperately bears further reflection. Another reason why so many children have behavioral problems today is because they are children of divorce. Enough studies have linked the trauma of divorce on kids with resultant antisocial behaviors to make this a bit of a “no-brainer”, yet too many American parents continue to believe the fallacy that “it is better to come from a broken home than to live in one”. Somewhere along the line we have also rejected the possibility that “staying together for the sake of the kids” has considerable merit. A little-known and little-heeded recent study indicated that children of divorced parents are substantially less likely to be able to enter into or sustain their own marriages once they reach adulthood then those who come from intact families, even from intact families that were marked by a considerable amount of ongoing marital conflict.

 

No one in progressive, secular America wants to grapple with that particular revelation. To do so would be to admit that the liberalization of popular opinion about (and laws pertaining to) divorce in this country during the past 35 years has been the chief reason so many of our nation’s children are growing up emotionally crippled and unable to sustain their own marriages.

 

So instead, when Jane or John begins to manifest the behavioral scars that living through a nasty divorce has been repeatedly proven to cause, the custodial parent goes to the local pediatrician and gets a Ritalin prescription. During the 1960’s “mother’s little helper” was Valium. At least then she only took it for herself. Today she feeds some of its more modern medicinal replacements to her kids.

 

You may by now be wondering why this article seems aimed at American culture in general in a column that usually addresses issues in the American Church. The reason is simple and profoundly saddening. Some statistics indicate Christian parents are divorcing in numbers approaching the national norm. Some of these same parents are also medicating their children. Just like their unbelieving neighbors more and more Christian parents have jumped on the pediatric-antipsychotic bandwagon and I will take the risk of betting that a disproportionately large number of those who have are single parents by reason of divorce

 

It is imperative that the Church in the United States recognize one of the greatest threats to the “family values” we so often like to identify ourselves with today and that is the growing acceptance of unbiblical divorces by both congregations and the leaders of those congregations. Make no mistake about it, the breakdown of Christian marriages is breaking down the church itself and at some point we may wake up to find out that we have passed the point of no return.

 

You cannot medicate away what is basically the result of this acceptance of sin, whether it’s inside the church or outside. Drugs may have their place in helping kids who have been so badly affected by bad parenting and easy divorces that they need to be medically stabilized for a time but, ultimately, the results of sin cannot be removed this way. What is required is parental repentance and the true healing that can only result from it. Beyond this we, as the Church in America, need to corporately repent for taking on the world’s idea of marital morality rather than the Biblical model. Repentance in both cases will be a hard road, but it is the only road back from what our selfishness as adults has wrought in the lives of both our children and our churches as a whole.