Fore! The Big Golf Controversy and Your Child’s Mental Illness

The Rules of the Game

As patriotic, red blooded, God-fearing Americans, you are doubtlessly already aware of the debate roiling the professional golf world. For the heathen among us, a recap: the sport’s governing bodies plan to reengineer golf balls so they don’t go as far. The reception from the world’s top players has been less than enthusiastic. It seems they don’t like the rules of the game being arbitrarily changed after they have applied themselves with great dedication for decades to master the sport as it exists.

My take? I have none, because I honestly don’t care. But the debate affords an excellent opportunity to rant about Big Pharma, so here goes. But first, for those who aren’t connoisseurs of golf, a few similar sports examples to set the scene:

-          Imagine if basketball decides to get rid of the 3 point line. What would happen to all the players who have spent their lives mastering those shots?

-          Imagine hockey saying your team loses a point every time you hit an opponent. Would our tough, un-toothed Canadians be replaced by figure skaters?

-          Imagine football saying that field goals suddenly count more than touchdowns. How long before the local soccer star has a bigger NFL contract than Patrick Mahomes?

I could go on, and I’m sure you can think of your own fanciful examples. The point being that these sports are “socially constructed,” as the cool kids like to say, to reward certain actions and strategies, and discourage others. Changing the rules of the game – changing what you reward and what you punish – is no minor thing, but changes the nature of the players themselves. Return to golf for a moment. Here is the before and after of a big star, who made the informed decision to change his training regimen because of the advantage extra strength would give him in the modern game:

Not pictured: Exciting Training Montage

Now imagine telling beefy Bryson that, oh, sorry, we’re going back to Par 3s only, you better practice your short game instead.

 What does all this have to do with schools and your child’s mental illness? Well, schools are socially constructed, too. As our betters (you know, the ones with graduate degrees in education and the little red book where their hearts ought to be) work hard to change the nature of education, children who might once have succeeded will start to fail. Now, think of Bryson, and that three point shooter, and that hockey enforcer, before answering this next question: if the nature and goals of schooling abruptly change, is a child necessarily mentally ill for performing poorly in class?

Here is my deep dive into the origins of American kindergarten for The Federalist. There is no debate: kindergarten was invented to allow children a few hours of socializing time in a day to play, sing, and dance. Now I know some of you think I’m exaggerating, that it can’t possibly be that bad out there, but I promise you I am not: hardly a week goes by without a child being sent to me by her kindergarten teacher for mind-altering ADHD drugs because she, at age 5, is having a hard time focusing on her kindergarten tests and homework.

Yes, that is absolute madness, but it is madness warmly embraced by childhood’s greatest predator, The American Academy of Pediatrics. It makes me so upset I can barely write, so I will try to calm down to say the following: put aside the debate about the nature of childhood and whether young children should be forced to do worksheets all day. Let’s surrender, give them the victory, acknowledge their power over us and our families: okay, rulers, you have the crown, you’re in charge, you can shove Common Core down our throats, you can rewrite the grading standards to make demonstrating on behalf of trans rights the only way to earn straight As, you can change the rules of the game as much as you want. Even so, even if we fully cede their right to make school in their image – do they not understand that they are in fact changing school? Do they not understand that by their own actions they reveal it is a game with changeable rules, that it is socially constructed? How then can you diagnose someone with mental illness and drug them into a zombie state… when you’re the one who changed the rules?

What are doctors even doing coming within a hundred miles of a classroom? Does a medical education also give you expertise on a childhood social studies curriculum? What if school were changed so the new rules of the game were that only the kids who ran fastest and jumped highest got As, should doctors now give their slow and weak patients anabolic steroids to catch up to their peers? If not, then why drug children to more perfectly fit into the current social construction? How is this medicine?

Let’s say the proposed golf changes go forward, and all of a sudden the smaller, more iron-skilled players start winning more tournaments. Ok, so be it. But would that justify you going and forcibly drugging the heavy hitters to pharmacologically compel them to lose muscle mass? It’s crazy to even imagine. Yet here we are, radically changing the nature of childhood these past few decades, and instead of having care, compassion, and understanding for the children who don’t excel in the new rules – instead of, dare I say it, questioning the new rules – we dare to diagnose those children as problematic? There is a big problem here, and it’s not them – it’s us!

So next time your child’s kindergarten teacher tells you to take him to the doctor because he’s struggling to complete his math worksheets, ask her if she’s a Jordan Spieth fan…

Thank you for reading, enjoy the Masters this weekend, and all my family’s best wishes to yours for a blessed Easter season!