Drug Your Way To A More Perfect You!

Sonny is on a downslide. When it happens, it happens slowly, but eventually I wake up to it. His teachers tell us he’s not behaving well in school anymore, and he’s definitely more difficult to work with at home — he’s prone to giggles and/or whining. His attention span, never magnificent even at its peak, is dwindling.

It’s frustrating to me that the default solution to this is to tweak his medications. Is this parenting? It feels more like robotics or car repair or something. We need to fix a few faulty circuits. How do we do that? We can’t open him up and replace the broken bits with new and improved ones… so instead we give him these little pills and a half teaspoon of liquid, and hope it does the trick. If it doesn’t, we’ll give him a few more pills. Sitting him down for a chat, working with him to see that he does better — all the basic stuff that I once assumed was the key to being a father — has almost nothing to do with any of this.

Once upon a time, I was adamant in my belief that this nation was overdrugging its children. Everybody was ADHD, or hyperactive, or in some way imperfect, and the only way to fix these problems was to visit the pharmacologist. I wasn’t going to play that game. Now to my horror I learn that the druggers are right. Sonny is not unique; he’s simply an extreme case. Is your child misbehaving? Well, my friend. You can do the things the slow way, guiding your child with well-placed words and providing a healthy environment. Or you can give him a little pill with breakfast, one that will zap all the right places in your child’s very mechanical brain, and you might well see an improvement by this weekend. Who wouldn’t want to jump for the pill bottle?

On the one hand, I know this is how it has to be. Sonny has a genetic disorder, and this is how we help him get better. I sure as hell don’t wish it was fifty years ago, before these drugs existed and before anybody had any idea there was such a thing as Fragile X. Back then, Sonny could well have wound up in an institution, a warehouse for broken children.

On the other hand, this parenting-in-a-bottle has real implications. We are in effect saying to Sonny: Don’t be that person. Be this person. We can trim back the more extreme elements of his personality just like we take him for a haircut. It makes me wonder what the world of pharmacology will be in 2058. We are all born prone (or not prone) to various traits: Hyperactivity is just the start. We’ll soon know smack out of the womb if our child is likely to be an alcoholic, or a homosexual, a violent person or a peaceful one. Good at math or good at words. And whatever we don’t like, we’ll be able to change, right from day one.

Am I overthinking this? Maybe. But maybe not. Look at India right now, where girls are being aborted by the thousands, because the cultural preference for boys is so strong. We have our own cultural preferences, and I don’t think many people would have qualms about drugging our kids a hundred different ways to make sure they fall squarely in the middle of the bell curve.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not throwing any of Sonny’s three drugs into the garbage so I can take some crazy stand about the what-ifs coming down the road decades from now. In fact, I am going to write to Sonny’s shrink right now to see about tweaking his dosages. We need to get them just right.