The Age Of Ritalin

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Her parents took Erin to a psychiatrist just before her fifth birthday. "He saw us for 45 minutes," Charlene says. "He read the teacher's report. He saw Erin for 15 minutes. He said, 'Your daughter is ADHD, and here's a prescription for Ritalin.' I sobbed." Charlene had a lot of friends who did not believe in ADHD and thought maybe she and Tim were just being hard on Erin. "I thought, 'Maybe there is something else we can do,'" Charlene says. "I knew that medicine can mask things. So I tore up the prescription." Tim thought that it was possible the doctor's diagnosis was too hasty and didn't want to believe it. "Part of us said, 'How can he look at a kid for 15 minutes and judge?'" Says Charlene: "I believed she had ADHD, but I knew we needed a two-pronged approach."

Among the most eloquent in his skepticism about the use of Ritalin for children who are not severely disabled is Dr. Lawrence Diller, author of Running on Ritalin (Bantam Books; $25.95). He wonders whether there is still a place for childhood in an anxious, downsized America. "What if Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn were to walk into my office tomorrow?" he asks. "Tom's indifference to schooling and Huck's 'oppositional' behavior would surely have been cause for concern. Would I prescribe Ritalin for them too?"

In Diller's view, many Americans are so worried about their jobs, the marketplace and their children's chances for success that they place impossible pressures on kids to perform, at younger and younger ages. "In order for them to succeed, we make them take performance enhancers," Diller says. "A society that depends on medication to cope does so at its own risk."

There used to be different niches for people with differences in talent, skills and personality, he argues, but Americans are becoming more and more programmed to force their children into a mold. "There is an emotional cost, and eventually there will be a physical cost of taking square and rectangular people and fitting them into round holes," he says. "Performance enhancers--Ritalin, Viagra and Prozac--will remain popular until people question this goal."

Three days after Erin started kindergarten, her parents got their first call from the teacher. "She was a sweet lady. She tried to work with us," Charlene recalls. "But she said, 'I've been teaching 40 years, and I've never seen a child like this.'" Adds Tim: "You could see Erin was trying to sit still, but she was trying all these different ways--rocking, lifting one leg, sitting on her hands." Because California law requires that schools provide appropriate education for each child, the parents met with school officials. After evaluating Erin, they said she was not a "special needs" child and could be treated in the classroom. "The only ones who did not believe that were us and the teacher," says Tim. "ADHD does not mean you are missing a limb. She looked normal, but she was slightly off."