| My wife has been teaching 2nd and 3rd grade for 8 years now so she has real-world, in-the-trehnches experience with this issue. If you were to ask her she would tell you that the answer won't be found in one extreme or the other but instead lies somewhere in between. It's a proven fact that children have different learning styles and learning needs. She has found that some kids who are bouncing of the walls respond to solutions as simple as being allowed to stand up while doing their work or holding a squeeze ball while at their desks. For other children she has seen that if they miss their medication they turn into uncontrollable psychopaths. And no amount of effort to adapt to their learning style changes the situation.
On one hand, the single greatest contributing factor to the well-being of a kid, my wife would tell you, is homelife stability. She used to teach at one school where 17 of her 20 kids were considered "at risk". They came from homes where one, or both, of the parents were in prison, or where the only food they ate was the food they got from school, or where they spent their time at home caring for their younger siblings. She teaches at a school now where things are just the opposite. 17 of her 20 kids are considered "normal" and they all have stable homelives. They have parents who are involved in the lives of their children: they help with homework, take part in school and community activities, etc.
On the other hand, my wife and I also strongly believe that we have slowly been poisoning ourselves and our children due to the way we have damaged the environment we live in. I think a lot of the psychological problems we are dealing with today are either caused by, or are at least exacerbated by, physiological defeciencies or imbalances. It is naive to think that consuming produce covered in poison, or eating meat and animal byproducts from creatures who are pumped full of hormones and steroids and who are fed their own dead, or bombarding ourselves with radiation of every kind will have no ill effect on us.
Invariably, one of the factors that gets mentioned whenever there is a discussion on the decline of the Roman empire is how many of the citizens, especially the affluent senators, were suffering from lead poisoning and it was causing serious pysocological harm. What makes one think that modern man is somehow immune to such dangers? The term "mad hatter" or "mad as a hatter" was born during the industrial revolution. In the process of creating hats mercury was used to treat the felt that was used. The hatters breathed in "mercury steam" all day long. Just as people in that time period were ignorant of the harmful effects of some of their activities so to are we ignorant of the harmful effects of some of our activities.
My life has been COMPLETELY changed because of the medication I take. I'm 33 years old and it has only been in the past 3 years that I have truly felt like a person...like "myself." At the same time my friend's daughter almost killed herself because when she was on medication she began hearing voices that were telling her to harm herself.
There is no easy, clear answer to this problem; like most things in life, it is fraught with ambiguity. |