One of the most shocking statistics in America is that almost 10% of children under the age of 18 are taking drugs to combat “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (“ADHD”). Therefore, it’s no surprise that, in this time of shortages, there’s now a shortage of ADHD medications. I, for one, think that’s a good thing because I believe that the huge upsurge in ADHD diagnoses is a product of societal and educational problems and that the medicines used, which are actually amphetamines, are creating a generation of addicted and very damaged children.

ADHD is called a “neurodevelopmental disorder” and is characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and chaotic behavior, among other things, with the important part being that they are “age-inappropriate” behaviors. To which I say horse-pucky.

The important part about ADHD is that it’s diagnosed twice as often in boys compared to girls. As far as I’m concerned, what it really boils down to is the fact that we live in a sit-down, emotion-driven world, which is antithetical to boy energy, which is about movement and action.

In modern American schools, most playground activities are constrained because they’re (a) dangerous and (b) competitive. When I was growing up, that’s what boys did: They engaged in risky, hyperkinetic, competitive behavior during playground breaks, running out their energy like frisky puppies. Meanwhile, we girls sat in circles and talked or played jacks. Now, the poor boys are forced into those same circles.

Image by AI.

What makes it worse is that, after school, unless their parents can put the boys in a sports program, the boys continue to sit. They stare at the internet, exercising only their thumbs if they’re playing some sort of shoot-em-up game. The sex that needs to move is physically inert.

Also, in all American schools, classrooms require students to sit still and listen to someone lecture at them. That’s hard for adults and, even in my day, was hard for boys despite their running around on the playground. Now, though, those poor little unexercised boys must sit and listen for hours on end.

It doesn’t have to be that way. My kids were in Montessori schools for several years. Maria Montessori understood that all children (especially boys) are physical beings. Children are not chained to their desks. First, teachers don’t deliver mind-numbing lectures to a whole class. Instead, they do mini-lessons for those children who are working on something specific. Moreover, provided that the children’s brains are engaged in their projects and they’re not being disruptive, their little bodies are free to move around.

Finally, in public schools, reading used to focus on adventure books for boys. I must admit that I did not enjoy reading The Sea Wolf or Treasure Island. I wanted feelings books, but like most good little girls, I put up with it anyway.

The sensible thing to have done when educators realized that books were tilted too much towards boys’ craving for adventure and bravery would have been to have some of each type of book (adventure and emotions) in the classroom. Instead, our hyperfeminized education system opted to force boys to read about feelings all the time. Since boys don’t like that, and they’re not good little girls, they push back.

Thanks to boring, hyperfeminized education and a planned lack of physical outlets, all children are bored, and boys are especially bored. They wiggle around, act out, and do anything but learn.

Instead of changing the education system, though, the teachers explain to worried parents that their little darling has ADHD. The doctor concurs and, suddenly, their baby is on amphetamines, which is what Adderall and other ADHD drugs are. (Weirdly, these drugs have a paradoxical pacifying, rather than energizing, effect on children).

If you’re wondering why so many young people are into drugs, I’m betting that one of the reasons is that they’ve been fed uppers since they were little. They don’t even know what their real brain is supposed to feel like. Take them off the drugs and, unsurprisingly, they show all the problems that they never learned to control by themselves, such as inattention, disorganization, impulse control, and hyperactivity.

That’s why I think it’s a wonderful thing that there’s a shortage of ADHD meds. “A lingering shortage of medications to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is forcing patients to scramble to obtain the prescription drugs they need.”

The UPI article, of course, doesn’t address the huge, troubling upsurge in ADHD diagnoses. Instead, it just talks about the problem of missed prescriptions to treat “one of the most frequently occurring neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood.”

Maybe, just maybe, parents will figure out that, without the drug available, they need to work on giving their children, especially their boys, more physical and mental stimulation. And maybe, just maybe, if this works and word spreads, the plague of medicalizing and drugging normal childhood behavior will pass, and parents will demand that their schools, instead of pathologizing their children, become more responsive to children’s actual needs.