My apologies, I realized I forgot to link the promised article about kindergarten’s origins, here it is:
“ Peabody depicts a world with not even a hint of the early childhood academics my patients know. After hymns and musical games, the main tasks of each day are playing more games, doing gymnastics, and dancing. No state standards to be met here, unless the state has legislated a standard for totally awesome fun.”
Well said! Historically, Institutions tend to fail because of strategic incompetence, poor leadership or management, and the like. When I think about what has happened to the AAP and the AMA in recent years, these incompetencies combined with a movement away from their telos’ seem to be the culprit. It is neither stupidity or sloth, but arrogance and ideological capture that has created their demise. Oh sure, they still exist, moving big piles of money around, but they no longer serve their mission.
I don’t treat children, but when the AAP recommended masking soccer players during the pandemic, I realized what a clown show this institution was. Though arbitrary, with nary an evidenced based footnote, schools adopted this idiotic approach. Watching those kids sucking air through their masks on an open field looked more like child abuse than protection. I understand how fear can drive us in the wrong direction, but this looked like malfeasance. I now read most AAP recommendations with suspicion and contempt, which is what a radical political activist organization that pretends its duty is to the health of children deserves.
As physicians, we should hasten the demise of these institutions, and form new ones in their stead, refocusing on our true mission to our profession and our patients.
As a civilized society, the measure of harms we are perpetrating on our children with inappropriate exposure to adult themes (for the affirmation of those adults no less!), and shifting the ground under them for our own comfort as you mentioned, are signs of a culture in decay. It is time lock arms and take it back.
The AAP released guidance that the standard of care for obese children should be bariatric surgery and medication. Not good nutrition and getting kids off screens and more active.
That says it all.
So when we wonder why the standard of care by the AAP for any child that’s suddenly ‘gender confused’ is surgical and hormonal transition… to the opposite gender.
We know this is about maximum money making for the medical mafia. And not the actual health of our children.
Apr 12, 2023·edited Apr 12, 2023Liked by Adrian Gaty
Let the destruction begin. These organizations have become a mirror of the federal government and corrupted beyond repair, no longer performing anything even remotely resembling their original mission. Starve them out of existence.
Apr 4, 2023·edited Apr 4, 2023Liked by Adrian Gaty
So, encountering public schools, I remember being confused as to why parents were so willing to believe that their young child needed medication. In my prior experience, I had seen children with so many different ways of being...and medication had not been a consideration. Parents largely were not in the classroom at the public school. They believed teachers when the teachers attributed the problems to the child, and the solution to be a manipulation of the child, sometimes chemically, sometimes behaviorally. The solution was almost never problem solved on the level of the classroom, the culture, the inappropriate expectations. It was a rare parent who I observed say, I know my child and I trust that if there is a problem that I trust my child is responding to that problem authentically in a way that can help us understand if we try to find out more.
As a parent I was bewildered and pained . As a teacher, I tried to mitigate the damage and reframe the situation in a positive light, noticing the healthy function of the children's behaviors and expressions. I had to be so careful trying not to diminish fellow teachers whose personal authority would not take kindly to being undermined. It was such an unhealthy culture that it nearly made me sick trying to find a path through.
Obviously, if you can see how such an institution can pathologize a child, then you can understand how it simultaneously can pathologize the teachers, and even the families. We are simultaneously institutionalized alongside the children, and cannot escape those same structures, unless we make an effort to except ourselves. How many people of all ages come away from this experience thinking: "something must be wrong with me"?
I also attended Catholic school! But just grade school. I actually did enjoy it, as well as I remember, except for being reprimanded once for checking out library books above my reading level (because I liked the art on the cover), and 3 masses a week during school was more than I would ever have chosen. When I went on to public school, it was out and out distasteful, which led me to desire never to repeat that experience with my own children.
Excellent article. As a mom who was surrounded by parents who drugged their kids so they'd "fit in" better with the teacher's requested behavior, I was always disgusted by this, and angry at doctors who pushed the drugs. My son was, and still is, at 26, a wiggle worm who asks a lot of questions. I refused to drug him. Today, he's an entrepreneur, self-taught in his field of endeavor.
OMG yes you are on track! I have been a "teacher" most of my adult life, but in mostly play-based, community-based environments. I went into public preschool one year. I was so excited to get to be with this group of kids, imagining it would be as healthy as it had been before. The board of education supervisors talked a good game in the interview about play, socialization, etc., but then I realized that those terms for them are defined in the context of directed and finely controlled activities. Everything needed to be purposeful, with clearly defined tasks, which are simultaneously assessments (tests). And then the central authority sends their minders to pressure everyone down the line to keep to the tasks, with the final destination of that pressure being the kids!
Apr 4, 2023·edited Apr 4, 2023Liked by Adrian Gaty
I taught a parenting class of parents and three year olds in the afternoons. It was great! All about noticing and connecting with your child, understanding them, supporting them, appreciating them... And all very open and playful.
As the year wore on I was so stressed and thinking about escaping the unhealthy preschool machine. I had the opportunity to visit other preschool classrooms, and I saw how children with strong social drives became known as problems. When their every move must be directed by a teacher, a child who is trying to get to know others is a problem, a chaotic force, and these kids end up in corners, being told that they didn't listen to the teacher and that is why they are being reprimanded or isolated.
Another big problem demographic are the children of immigrants. They don't speak the language. How long can they look attentive when they don't know what's going on, and their bodies are urging to move, to find an approachable world....
Problem children: the social ones. The physically active (more often boys), the ones who don't understand the language, the children who have emotional expression that requires healthy attached support, and of course any child not suited to being in a world predicated upon following the minute direction of a teacher.
The three year old class. At the end of the year they wanted to renew my contract, but they said common core would be extended to the three year olds, and I would now need to run the class with that culture of constant direction and assessment.
They explained that in order to secure funding, they needed assessments to prove the value of the program. The ambition was to offer universal free preschool into increasingly younger ages. They mentioned that many of these children were not getting their needs met when they were home with their parents. The state would offer the poor children what is good for them.
Can you believe how they think?!
I wrote the supervisors of my observations about the problems with this approach. I was so stressed. I cannot live that way. I could not stomach more of that experience. Until that experience, I had naively imagined there could be nothing better than spending all day with children, and also with families. Now I know what it means to speak a nice sounding doctrine with a very unhealthy reality.
AAP is funded by big Pharma, so what else would you expect then them to do but push drugs. It’s not only the SSRI’s but also the statins for obese children rather than looking at diet and other lifestyle factors that can be reversed that are causing the problem! Over 90% of all the school shooters were on psychotropic drugs that was causing their mental derangement, and they acted out to express their feelings that they were out casts! Correcting nutrient deficiencies is not in the medicine man’s playbook. Vit D on the top of the list!
The widely popular experimentation of children on SSRIS to manage their "uncontrolled emotional problems", so endemic to puberty and endocrine changes needs to be drastically curtailed.
Doctors OBSESSION with prescribing them to teens and pre-teens paradoxically elicits more mood instability, irritability and suicidal ideation. This defeats the purpose of SSRIS, but illuminates why they shouldn't be prescribed to children.
It could be argued that they are overprescribed 90% of the time. What works with a fidgety child - attention, exercise, creative expression, community - also works for "depression," "bipolar," and yes, even "schizophrenia." "Mental illness" is about our failure as a society, not the individual's curse. We are being taught by our own vulnerabilities - and yet we mow over them with drugs. See A Midwestern Doctor's Substack for excellent articles on antidepressants and "mental illness" (medicalising the human condition).
I really appreciate your comments and insight, thank you! The famous non response from ADHD stimulant pushers is that the drugs are “both overprescribed and under prescribed” … but they never do anything about the overprescribing problem, just constantly search for new demographics to prescribe to…
Man, do I love reading your posts! And I’m always happy to pick on big Pharma… Watching them keep a low bar low for recovering opiate addicts by keeping them on bupe or methadone for life with no change in lifestyle still puts a crook in my craw. But that’s not new news from me…
So is this the same American Academy of Pediatrics that approves “life-saving surgical procedures” for children that aren’t comfortable in their bodies? Not trying to start a fire just honestly curious.
Don't forget that most recovering addicts are excellent SSRI & "antipsychotic" (neuroleptic) drugs. Throw in the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, and maybe a little Electroshock, and by then, who cares about addiction?
I think my kindergarten teacher was fantastic - Early 1980s, and she managed to mix play and learning (including Spanish) very well. She actually held back a few kids over the years - not because it was such a strictly academic thing, but because she really felt that kids that needed more reinforcement of the basics would often be happier in the looser environment of kindergarten than trying to keep up sitting in a desk in first grade. Her goal was to be getting the kids at the point of beginning to read by first grade and give them a broad introduction to a lot of things. In that sense, it was academic, but this was back in the day when the thought was that testing kids before second grade was pretty pointless, and so, at least at my school, they weren't.
My mom worked in that classroom for decades. I don't think anyone there ever recommended anyone be medicated, much less insisted on it, as I've heard happens sometimes nowadays. There was one boy who started Ritalin about 3/4 through the school year in the early 90s. My mom's comment on that was that if this kid needed Ritalin, then all of the boys in the class did, meaning, of course, that she thought it was unnecessary. It's not that they didn't have their share of rowdy kids - it's just that it's not the way they did things.
Two out of my three nephews were put on ADHD drugs starting in kinder because they didn't fit the mold. Too kinesthetic, too fidgety, needed constant motion. Now those boys are 15 and 22....and both still on the drugs and have been the whole way through. I wonder what they would be like if they had just leaned in to their temperaments instead of trying to conform. It reminds me of my experiences as a patient with allergy doctors and psychiatrists.... are you supposed to just medicate the symptoms away forever?? What if the problem isn't you?
Robert Whitaker, in his excellent "Anatomy of an Epidemic" shows evidence that children put on ADHD drugs are more likely to develop addictive behaviours throughout life.
For one, they depend on the fact that they can adjust their mood/feeling with a pill. For another, their brains are still forming, and dopamine channels form in their mind making it more and more difficult to achieve dopamine balance & happiness - so they reach for more and more. That's just 2, I'm sure there are more.
My apologies, I realized I forgot to link the promised article about kindergarten’s origins, here it is:
“ Peabody depicts a world with not even a hint of the early childhood academics my patients know. After hymns and musical games, the main tasks of each day are playing more games, doing gymnastics, and dancing. No state standards to be met here, unless the state has legislated a standard for totally awesome fun.”
https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/19/are-schools-contributing-to-skyrocketing-adhd-diagnoses-im-a-pediatrician-and-i-think-so/
Well said! Historically, Institutions tend to fail because of strategic incompetence, poor leadership or management, and the like. When I think about what has happened to the AAP and the AMA in recent years, these incompetencies combined with a movement away from their telos’ seem to be the culprit. It is neither stupidity or sloth, but arrogance and ideological capture that has created their demise. Oh sure, they still exist, moving big piles of money around, but they no longer serve their mission.
I don’t treat children, but when the AAP recommended masking soccer players during the pandemic, I realized what a clown show this institution was. Though arbitrary, with nary an evidenced based footnote, schools adopted this idiotic approach. Watching those kids sucking air through their masks on an open field looked more like child abuse than protection. I understand how fear can drive us in the wrong direction, but this looked like malfeasance. I now read most AAP recommendations with suspicion and contempt, which is what a radical political activist organization that pretends its duty is to the health of children deserves.
As physicians, we should hasten the demise of these institutions, and form new ones in their stead, refocusing on our true mission to our profession and our patients.
As a civilized society, the measure of harms we are perpetrating on our children with inappropriate exposure to adult themes (for the affirmation of those adults no less!), and shifting the ground under them for our own comfort as you mentioned, are signs of a culture in decay. It is time lock arms and take it back.
The AAP released guidance that the standard of care for obese children should be bariatric surgery and medication. Not good nutrition and getting kids off screens and more active.
That says it all.
So when we wonder why the standard of care by the AAP for any child that’s suddenly ‘gender confused’ is surgical and hormonal transition… to the opposite gender.
We know this is about maximum money making for the medical mafia. And not the actual health of our children.
Exactly
Let the destruction begin. These organizations have become a mirror of the federal government and corrupted beyond repair, no longer performing anything even remotely resembling their original mission. Starve them out of existence.
Even though I left the field, I will stand with you, lock arms with you, and scream loudly.
So, encountering public schools, I remember being confused as to why parents were so willing to believe that their young child needed medication. In my prior experience, I had seen children with so many different ways of being...and medication had not been a consideration. Parents largely were not in the classroom at the public school. They believed teachers when the teachers attributed the problems to the child, and the solution to be a manipulation of the child, sometimes chemically, sometimes behaviorally. The solution was almost never problem solved on the level of the classroom, the culture, the inappropriate expectations. It was a rare parent who I observed say, I know my child and I trust that if there is a problem that I trust my child is responding to that problem authentically in a way that can help us understand if we try to find out more.
As a parent I was bewildered and pained . As a teacher, I tried to mitigate the damage and reframe the situation in a positive light, noticing the healthy function of the children's behaviors and expressions. I had to be so careful trying not to diminish fellow teachers whose personal authority would not take kindly to being undermined. It was such an unhealthy culture that it nearly made me sick trying to find a path through.
Obviously, if you can see how such an institution can pathologize a child, then you can understand how it simultaneously can pathologize the teachers, and even the families. We are simultaneously institutionalized alongside the children, and cannot escape those same structures, unless we make an effort to except ourselves. How many people of all ages come away from this experience thinking: "something must be wrong with me"?
Exactly!
After reading your excellent comment, I now realize 12 years of Catholic school wasn’t so bad! Lol!
I also attended Catholic school! But just grade school. I actually did enjoy it, as well as I remember, except for being reprimanded once for checking out library books above my reading level (because I liked the art on the cover), and 3 masses a week during school was more than I would ever have chosen. When I went on to public school, it was out and out distasteful, which led me to desire never to repeat that experience with my own children.
Excellent article. As a mom who was surrounded by parents who drugged their kids so they'd "fit in" better with the teacher's requested behavior, I was always disgusted by this, and angry at doctors who pushed the drugs. My son was, and still is, at 26, a wiggle worm who asks a lot of questions. I refused to drug him. Today, he's an entrepreneur, self-taught in his field of endeavor.
Way to go! He’s so so lucky to have you!
OMG yes you are on track! I have been a "teacher" most of my adult life, but in mostly play-based, community-based environments. I went into public preschool one year. I was so excited to get to be with this group of kids, imagining it would be as healthy as it had been before. The board of education supervisors talked a good game in the interview about play, socialization, etc., but then I realized that those terms for them are defined in the context of directed and finely controlled activities. Everything needed to be purposeful, with clearly defined tasks, which are simultaneously assessments (tests). And then the central authority sends their minders to pressure everyone down the line to keep to the tasks, with the final destination of that pressure being the kids!
I taught a parenting class of parents and three year olds in the afternoons. It was great! All about noticing and connecting with your child, understanding them, supporting them, appreciating them... And all very open and playful.
As the year wore on I was so stressed and thinking about escaping the unhealthy preschool machine. I had the opportunity to visit other preschool classrooms, and I saw how children with strong social drives became known as problems. When their every move must be directed by a teacher, a child who is trying to get to know others is a problem, a chaotic force, and these kids end up in corners, being told that they didn't listen to the teacher and that is why they are being reprimanded or isolated.
Another big problem demographic are the children of immigrants. They don't speak the language. How long can they look attentive when they don't know what's going on, and their bodies are urging to move, to find an approachable world....
Problem children: the social ones. The physically active (more often boys), the ones who don't understand the language, the children who have emotional expression that requires healthy attached support, and of course any child not suited to being in a world predicated upon following the minute direction of a teacher.
The three year old class. At the end of the year they wanted to renew my contract, but they said common core would be extended to the three year olds, and I would now need to run the class with that culture of constant direction and assessment.
They explained that in order to secure funding, they needed assessments to prove the value of the program. The ambition was to offer universal free preschool into increasingly younger ages. They mentioned that many of these children were not getting their needs met when they were home with their parents. The state would offer the poor children what is good for them.
Can you believe how they think?!
I wrote the supervisors of my observations about the problems with this approach. I was so stressed. I cannot live that way. I could not stomach more of that experience. Until that experience, I had naively imagined there could be nothing better than spending all day with children, and also with families. Now I know what it means to speak a nice sounding doctrine with a very unhealthy reality.
Gosh, what an experience. Thank you, sincerely, for taking the time to share it, and bless you for your work!
AAP is funded by big Pharma, so what else would you expect then them to do but push drugs. It’s not only the SSRI’s but also the statins for obese children rather than looking at diet and other lifestyle factors that can be reversed that are causing the problem! Over 90% of all the school shooters were on psychotropic drugs that was causing their mental derangement, and they acted out to express their feelings that they were out casts! Correcting nutrient deficiencies is not in the medicine man’s playbook. Vit D on the top of the list!
One more comment : Check out this research about vitamin D and pregnant women.
https://www.grassrootshealth.net/blog/results-vitamin-d-testing-programs/
VITAMIN D!!!! YES!!!!👉🌞
The widely popular experimentation of children on SSRIS to manage their "uncontrolled emotional problems", so endemic to puberty and endocrine changes needs to be drastically curtailed.
Doctors OBSESSION with prescribing them to teens and pre-teens paradoxically elicits more mood instability, irritability and suicidal ideation. This defeats the purpose of SSRIS, but illuminates why they shouldn't be prescribed to children.
It could be argued that they are overprescribed 90% of the time. What works with a fidgety child - attention, exercise, creative expression, community - also works for "depression," "bipolar," and yes, even "schizophrenia." "Mental illness" is about our failure as a society, not the individual's curse. We are being taught by our own vulnerabilities - and yet we mow over them with drugs. See A Midwestern Doctor's Substack for excellent articles on antidepressants and "mental illness" (medicalising the human condition).
I really appreciate your comments and insight, thank you! The famous non response from ADHD stimulant pushers is that the drugs are “both overprescribed and under prescribed” … but they never do anything about the overprescribing problem, just constantly search for new demographics to prescribe to…
Doctors are never taught "Deprescribing," only prescribing.
Man, do I love reading your posts! And I’m always happy to pick on big Pharma… Watching them keep a low bar low for recovering opiate addicts by keeping them on bupe or methadone for life with no change in lifestyle still puts a crook in my craw. But that’s not new news from me…
So is this the same American Academy of Pediatrics that approves “life-saving surgical procedures” for children that aren’t comfortable in their bodies? Not trying to start a fire just honestly curious.
I always love reading your articles, friend.
Don't forget that most recovering addicts are excellent SSRI & "antipsychotic" (neuroleptic) drugs. Throw in the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, and maybe a little Electroshock, and by then, who cares about addiction?
I think my kindergarten teacher was fantastic - Early 1980s, and she managed to mix play and learning (including Spanish) very well. She actually held back a few kids over the years - not because it was such a strictly academic thing, but because she really felt that kids that needed more reinforcement of the basics would often be happier in the looser environment of kindergarten than trying to keep up sitting in a desk in first grade. Her goal was to be getting the kids at the point of beginning to read by first grade and give them a broad introduction to a lot of things. In that sense, it was academic, but this was back in the day when the thought was that testing kids before second grade was pretty pointless, and so, at least at my school, they weren't.
My mom worked in that classroom for decades. I don't think anyone there ever recommended anyone be medicated, much less insisted on it, as I've heard happens sometimes nowadays. There was one boy who started Ritalin about 3/4 through the school year in the early 90s. My mom's comment on that was that if this kid needed Ritalin, then all of the boys in the class did, meaning, of course, that she thought it was unnecessary. It's not that they didn't have their share of rowdy kids - it's just that it's not the way they did things.
the two "D's" of ADHD are lies
such people are typically much better at certain things, like pivoting to smarter R&D pathways and letting go of illogical things much earlier
Yep, and inventing the lightbulb!
Thank you for your examples - and perspective.
I've had a gut feeling that the schools were asking too much too young (as contributing to the ADD epidemic), but this makes so much sense.
Two out of my three nephews were put on ADHD drugs starting in kinder because they didn't fit the mold. Too kinesthetic, too fidgety, needed constant motion. Now those boys are 15 and 22....and both still on the drugs and have been the whole way through. I wonder what they would be like if they had just leaned in to their temperaments instead of trying to conform. It reminds me of my experiences as a patient with allergy doctors and psychiatrists.... are you supposed to just medicate the symptoms away forever?? What if the problem isn't you?
Robert Whitaker, in his excellent "Anatomy of an Epidemic" shows evidence that children put on ADHD drugs are more likely to develop addictive behaviours throughout life.
For one, they depend on the fact that they can adjust their mood/feeling with a pill. For another, their brains are still forming, and dopamine channels form in their mind making it more and more difficult to achieve dopamine balance & happiness - so they reach for more and more. That's just 2, I'm sure there are more.
You make me proud!
My first visit to this site.
Yes, I'm watching the Masters:
Up north, we consider the event as the 1st weekend of Spring.
Well written article!
And I will certainly share in my circle.
Happy Easter!
Thank you!