The Age Of Ritalin

Monday, Nov. 30, 1998 By NANCY GIBBS

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What exactly does a normal child look like? We've long since passed the time when childhood was an ungraded test--take your time, build your forts, play your games, the clock does not start until high school, maybe college. We give homework in first grade now. We're very busy people. And your parents will do anything, just anything, to help you get ahead.

"We lived with it," says Tim, of his daughter's behavior--the tantrums, the hitting, covering herself in Vaseline head to toe, day after day. He and his wife Charlene took parenting classes through their church and tried to be fair and firm. "We thought maybe she was just strong willed," Charlene said. By the time they put four-year-old Erin in preschool near their home in a town south of Los Angeles, "she couldn't keep her hands to herself," Charlene says. "She would hit other kids. And she would hug anyone at any time. She would hold hands when other kids didn't want to. She would do pesky, bothersome things to kids, like touching their hair or their sweaters. It was as if, since she couldn't make friends, she was saying, 'I'm going to get you to relate to me.'" In class she was not able to stay focused, even though the teacher-to-student ratio was 1 to 3.

Is there a parent in America who has heard the talk or read the best sellers about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the drugs used to treat it without wondering about his or her child--the first time he climbs onto the school bus still wearing his pj's or loses his fifth pair of mittens or finds 400 ways to sit in a chair? The debate goes straight to the heart of our expectations and values. How dreamy is too dreamy? Where is the line between an energetic child and a hyperactive one, between a spirited, risk-taking kid and an alarmingly impulsive one, between flexibility and distractibility? What if a little pill makes everything a bit easier, not just for severely impaired kids but for those who teachers say are a little too spacey or jumpy or hard to settle down? Is there something wrong with the kids--or is there something wrong with us?

For years Ritalin has been a godsend for children who were so hot-wired they were simply unreachable, and unteachable. In severe cases, the benefits of Ritalin (and the family of related drugs) on these children's ability to function and learn and cope are so direct that advocates say withholding the pills is a form of neglect.

"I used to take her fingers from her face and tell her, 'This is Mom. This is Planet Earth. This is today, and you need to brush your teeth,'" recalls Natasha Kern, a Portland, Ore., literary agent who identified her daughter Athena's troubles early on. These are the kids who get expelled from nursery school for disrupting every story circle and demolishing every Lego tower. Parents despair at seeing their children sad or lost or cast out; they hate themselves when they lose their tempers after the sixth meltdown of the day. These kids can be very bright, very charming--and impossible to live with. "They think of things that are fun and creative at the rate of about 10 per second," says Kern. "While you are trying to put out the fire they set toasting marshmallows on the stove, they are in the bathtub trying to see if goldfish will survive in hot water."