Overdiagnosed and overprotected children

There’s been much discussion for years now on whether children are overmedicated for behavioral problems. A very thoughtful report was just published by The Hastings Center: “Troubled Children: Diagnosing, Treating, and Attending to Context.” It asks the underlying question: Are increased rates of diagnosis and treatment with drugs appropriate or are healthily children simply being labeled as sick and given drugs to alter their moods and behavior? (The report is available online as a PDF file.)

With that on my mind, I was struck by a comment from Tanya Byron, an English psychologist, writer, and child therapist,

[W]e have to really listen and think about why a child is telling us something. The behaviour of children and young people is fundamental to a well-functioning society, because they can tell us what is going on more honestly than we tell ourselves.

If there really is an increase in mental disorders among children, what does this tell us? If there isn’t, what does giving psychopharmaceuticals to four-year-olds tell us about ourselves? And could we be honest about what it says?

Stigma: We are afraid to lose the competition of life

Byron also made a good point about the stigma of mental health: (emphasis added in the following quotations)

[I]t would be helpful if we could accept that mental illness and physical illness all lie on a continuum, and sometimes bits of our physical body don’t work very well, and sometimes bits of our mental body don’t work very well – and that that’s OK, and it’s actually not an indication of failure. If you break your leg, you are not going to suddenly be seen as less successful than you were before you had broken your leg. So why do we have this stigma around mental health?

… We are scared of people seeing us as somehow not the person they thought we were, as if life is a competition and the only way that you win it is by being completely invincible and robust and never being fragile or vulnerable. That is just ludicrous. That is why I like kids: because they remind us that life really isn’t like that.

On not letting children be children

I’m interested in “helicopter” parents and the overprotection of children. I have a copy of Margaret Nelson’s Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times. It looks very interesting, but hasn’t yet risen to the top of my reading list.

I’ve also been collecting stories on how children are much healthier – less obesity, depression, asthma – if they have more contact with nature, such as this article in New Scientist (behind a pay wall, unfortunately).

Tanya Byron, in her interview with Five Books, comments on Tim Gill’s book No Fear : Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society. If life for children these days is actually no more dangerous than it was for their parents, why is there so much overprotection?

It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s the media’. … I think we live in a fast-moving, multi-platform, multimedia society, where as it happens we are watching it happen. So as the planes go into the Twin Towers, we see it happen. … We are experiencing the trauma as the trauma happens, and then we internalise that, and suddenly the trauma becomes ours and we suddenly look at those we love most deeply and think, ‘I am not going to let that happen to them. So we will just keep you in your bedrooms until you are 18 and hope for the best!’ …

The irony is that we live in this risk-averse culture; we are perversely paranoid about our children’s safety, so we keep them indoors, and we then allow them to do their childhood – which is socialising, communicating, playing, etc. – online, and because none of us has had the experience of the online space, we haven’t even prepared them for that. So the real-world risks that we understand, because we faced them as children – we are keeping our own kids away from those, and driving them towards spaces where there are risks as well as opportunities and benefits. And we don’t even talk to them about this.

There are some recent stats which show that three-quarters of all five-year-olds are surfing the net, and often they are doing so unsupervised. Would you take your five-year-old to a huge shopping centre and say, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours’, and then go and have a cup of coffee? That is why this book is so good: because it highlights that irony, and the ridiculous way in which we are not letting children be children.

There’s food for thought here. The entire interview is interesting.

Resources:

Image: Smart Woman

Daisy Banks, Tanya Byron on Child Psychology and Mental Health, Five Books, March 17, 2011

Margaret Nelson, Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times

Nora Schultz, Country vs city: Green spaces are better for you, New Scientist, November 9, 2010 (subscription required)

Tim Bill, No Fear : Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society

Rowenna Davis, Behaviour drugs given to four-year-olds prompt calls for inquiry, The Guardian, March 18, 2011