Medication as a Form of Discipline

It’s no secret that more and more children are taking medications to control their behavior. Although I long ago stopped subscribing to Time and Newsweek, both those magazines had practically annual articles asking whether we’re medicating our children to death. In the magazines, the anti-medication consensus is always that the fault lies with lazy parents or teachers who just don’t want to deal with child energy. However, having dealt with a lot of child energy myself, I can understand that people would want a break from that. I therefore don’t think the issue is child energy. I think it’s the diminishing number of options parents feel that they have available to cope with the energy.

What I hear from many parents who medicate is that they were unable to control their kids by any other means. But delve into that “any other means” concept, and you discover that these parents feel that their disciplinary options are limited to (a) time outs and (b) talking with the child about his or her feelings. The latter approach seems to be especially popular, because these parents feel its least damaging to their child’s tender psyche. The practical effect is that, when these parents are faced with a naughty child, they “punish” the child by giving him (or her) a long, private heart to heart with Mommy or Daddy. Considering that kids crave parental connection, whether it’s tinged with disapproval or not, I don’t see any incentive for a child “disciplined” this way to stop acting naughty. To the contrary — I see this kind of “discipline” as an invitation to be bad.

For the parents caught in this cognitive trap, where they unintentionally keep rewarding and therefore reinforcing the child’s bad behavior, medicine must seem like, not just the last resort, but the only resort.

I actually subscribe to a more old-fashioned approach which is to punish my kids when they’re bad, and give them lots of positive attention and praise when they’re good. (And no, Greg, because I know what you’re thinking — I do not beat my children.)

My punishments involve taking things away — especially taking away my attention. Whatever I decide — whether it’s throwing away the toy involved in the sibling tug of war, dumping the container of ice cream that would have been desert, canceling the play date — that decision is swift and final. The children do not get long, drawn-out faux Freudian analyses or heart to heart talks about Mommy’s feelings. Those all wait for later (assuming I do them), when they’re no longer connected with the naughty behavior, but are being discussed as a road map for better future behavior. And as I said, I praise the heck out of my kids whenever they do something good — so much so that probably 75-80% of what comes out of my mouth is positive affirmations about genuinely good behavior.

My approach (swift, fair disinterested punishment for bad behavior, coupled with constant, loving praise for good behavior) means that I have nice kids. The other benefit is that, because I verbalize their good behaviors, rather than their bad ones, the kids and I have a strong sense that they are nice kids. That niceness is the intellectual atmosphere that surrounds us. And all of this is done without benefit of medication….

(By the way, I’m not saying my kids or I are perfect. Far from it. We all irritate each other, and some days are definitely worse than others. They have some behaviors that seem so hard wired nothing will improve them, and I can do my yelling with the best of them. Overall, though, there’s a positive sense in our house, where I think they’re good kids and they seem to think I’m a good Mommy.)

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