Boyhood not a disease

Boys are up to three times more likely to be treated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as girls; and the prescription of antipsychotic drugs to children — mostly boys — has gone up by 600 percent in the last few years, says psychologist Anthony Rao.

Has boyhood become an illness?

Mr. Rao, author of “The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in a Challenging and Complex World,” thinks we’re treating it as such.

“The problem really isn’t the boys,” Mr. Rao says. “It’s our expectations of them.”

Young boys need frequent breaks for physical play and release; they often read and write better standing up than sitting down; many find eye contact threatening; and they naturally prefer “doing” and “seeing” over “listening” and “talking,” he says.

But little of what they crave in terms of learning styles and physical needs fits into the traditional preschool or school day, where physical education and active recess time are at an all-time low.

This dichotomy leads many boys to fidget, bounce, act out and be labeled with ADHD, Mr. Rao says.

“A common response is to rush a diagnosis and start medicating immediately,” he says. “But a pill doesn’t teach anything.”

In other words, the impulse control and other self-management techniques these kids so desperately need to develop don’t come in the form of a pill. And yet medication — amphetamine, commonly sold in the form of Aderall, to be precise — is prescribed and FDA-approved for use in children as young as 3.

“Ours has become a culture where we medicate a range of behaviors even in kids as young as 2 and 3 years old,” says Dr. Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a staff writer for the New Yorker.

Dr. Groopman blames both the money-hungry pharmaceutical industry and high-anxiety parents who think that more — as in early intervention — is always better.

He can relate. Because, he says, when he was in elementary school in the late 1950s, he was one of those fidgety, bouncing-off-the-wall kids his fifth-grade teacher in Queens, N.Y., couldn’t stand.

“I’m sure I would have been diagnosed with ADHD. But instead of medicating me, my parents sent me to metal shop,” Dr. Groopman says.

This was only after the teacher had called his parents in to tell them their troublemaker with “schpilkes” — Yiddish for “ants in the pants” — would never be an academic success.

“She told them I was not college material,” Dr. Groopman says.

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