There Is No Ideal Child - So How Can We Drug A Kid To Become One?

Using Pharmaceuticals To Mask Our Real Duty To Our Children

Did you ever wonder why there are no how-to books on the best way to be a child? There are entire sections in Christian bookstores overloaded with tome after tome on Biblical Manhood and Biblical Femininity, many of them truly wonderful repositories of wisdom and advice - yet if your five-year-old is looking for a compelling coffee table volume on how best to child in a Biblical manner, she’ll be out of luck.

Hold on, publishers, before you fire up the presses to fill this market void, there are good reasons why such books wouldn’t catch on. For starters, unlike some of the sacrifices one must make to be a Godly adult, being a child – much like making one – involves doin’ what comes natur’lly. With my sincerest apologies to Irv, you don’t need to know how to read or write to have fun with your friends when you fly a kite. I’m sure the marketing majors out there can think of other reasons as well, starting with the fact that most four-year-olds would be incapable of reading the how-to manual in question. Yet even for precocious readers, such an educational book aimed at children would fail because it misunderstands how kids’ minds work. They don’t learn how to be brave or faithful by reading a checklist of virtues - they learn through stories, through the all-important moral imagination. If you want your kids to grow in wisdom, the last thing you would do would be to give them a dry book entitled On How to Be A Wise Child. You would instead spend your time reading them the stories of David and Goliath, the Fiery Furnace, the Lions’ Den, and so on – and don’t forget Narnia or Middle Earth! You wouldn’t give them a mountain climbing manual - you would fill their imagination with majestic mountain ranges. 

Most of all, however, I would argue the reason such a book can’t succeed is because there is no such thing as an ideal child. Now, if you read one of the Biblical Femininity books out there, chances are high you will encounter the Proverbs 31 woman. For those unfamiliar, this is shorthand for the Biblical ideal of a truly virtuous, God-fearing wife. Go and read her description: she has a CV that would make most of us green with envy! Among other things, she is an entrepreneur, buying good lands and planting them with vineyards, while also selling linens and other merchandise, in addition to devoting herself to charitable works for the needy, all the while finding the time to grow in wisdom as she runs her household and blesses her family. Perhaps I am wrong, please correct me if so, but I can’t recall any equally detailed Biblical description of a third grader.

There may be no ideal kid, but there was once a perfect one. Yet, while we have many accounts of Jesus’s ministry, Christ’s childhood is famously opaque. I won’t even dare to speculate on His demeanor as a toddler or preschooler. In this case, perhaps what God left out of the Bible is as important as what He included. If God wanted us to have a singular, idealized model of Biblical childhood - a Proverbs 31 child - He could easily have provided one. That He didn’t should be a strong warning to those who keep trying to fit children into behavioral molds of their own worldly devising.

What does this have to do with ADHD and Big Pharma? Well, simply put, we are currently drugging millions of children to conform, yet nobody involved has apparently paused to ask what we are conforming them to. Personally, I would be opposed to drugging children on principle, even if we did have a God-given ideal we were aiming at. In the absence of such an ideal, however, the point is moot, and so I am left to ask: what on earth are we doing??

But wait – there’s more! While the Bible is mostly silent about the specifics of an ideal child, it is anything but silent on the ideal parent. In fact, God couldn’t be clearer about what He wants out of us moms and dads. He hammers the point home over and over again.

For starters, let’s look to my dining room décor:

Prefer the New Testament? Let’s look to 2 Timothy:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Or Ephesians 6:

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

The Bible is clear on this point: we as parents are to dedicate ourselves to instructing our children in His word. There is no explicit Biblical command to teach our kids comp sci, or chemistry, or algebra, wonderful as all those subjects may be – yet God is rather pointed about His presence in the curriculum.

Are we obeying that teaching? It’s been a while since I perused the Common Core guidelines, but I’m pretty sure they don’t contain any references to Deuteronomy. Go ahead and try to smuggle in this beautiful old public school textbook to your public school today and see how fast they call the cops…

We have one very clear, repeated, consistent command from God about our duty as parents, and our society woke up one day and decided that, well, it didn’t really apply, we’re gonna go ahead and ignore that one. We thus send our kids to schools where they are taught a variety of things, including their teacher’s pronouns, but they most certainly don’t make the acquaintance of the sacred writings – literally the one thing God repeatedly tells us to acquaint our children with!

As if that’s not trouble enough, we then drug millions of our children to sit still and listen… to everything except the very teachings we have been commanded to teach them!

Let me put it this way. The great Voddie Baucham has a fantastic line about parents who send their kids off to Caesar and then are surprised when they come home Romans. His insight there is biting and convicting, but it’s not cynical enough. We are sending our kids off to Caesar, and then, if the kids aren’t good at obeying the Emperor, if they don’t come home Roman enough, we take them to the doctor to drug them to become even better little centurions.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Take a look at your kid’s face: whose image is your child made in? The President’s? The local school board chairman’s? The Common Core curriculum author’s? You know the answer, and it ain’t no educational bureaucrat. Don’t drug your children to conform to Caesar’s schools. Instead, do everything you can to keep from sending them off daily to Rome in the first place.  

To recap, I am trying to bring your attention today to two fundamental flaws when it comes to drugging children to fit in to our school system. The first is that we have no model of a perfect child, and it makes no sense to medicate someone to conform to a non-existent ideal. This is one of the reasons I harp so much on what kindergarten used to be like, or how radically different alternative schools today can be - we need to understand that a public school classroom in 2023 is a very particular construct, not an eternal Platonic form. A kid who might excel in a different setting shouldn’t have her mind numbed because her doctor is historically illiterate. The second major flaw relates to our shortcomings as adults: we do have a model of ideal parenting, one that insists upon our duty to teach our kids the very things our schools work so diligently not to teach them. By partnering with those schools to drug our children into better learning an ungodly curriculum, we are not just disobeying God, but flaunting our disobedience in His face. That typically doesn’t end well.

In closing, the next time your kid’s teacher suggests you take him to the local pediatrician for a good drugging, you might want to ask her what her favorite How-To book on childhood is – and what she’s been doing lately to help familiarize your little one with God’s word. If you get a blank stare, might be a sign that your kid doesn’t need a psychoactive medication as much as a change in learning environment…

Something to think about next time you’re browsing the masculinity section of the local bookstore. Thanks for reading, and have a great rest of your week!