The hearth defended

National Review, Dec 13, 2004 by Myrna Blyth

Eberstadt is also provocative on a subject she has written about knowledgeably before: the overmedicating of our troubled or, should we say, troublesome children, whom harried or self-involved parents just can't handle. In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of children diagnosed with an alphabet of ailments such as ADD or ADHD (attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder) and other "conduct" disorders such as ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), SAD (separation anxiety disorder), and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" to describe how social pressures were leading to the redefinition--the normalization--of behavior once seen as pathological. "In the case of the juvenile mental problems," Eberstadt writes, we are doing the opposite: "We are defining deviancy up so that children who would have been considered normal a quarter century ago are now judged to have intrinsic 'brain problems' and are treated accordingly."

Because of this, our children are being dosed with behavior-modifying drugs at a startling rate. Friends have told me that in some private schools in Manhattan, more than half the children receive their daily meds at lunchtime from the school nurse. Over the past decade the production of Ritalin, the most frequently prescribed of these drugs, has increased 700 percent. In fact, the drug's manufacturer created a seven-inch Mr. Potato Head look-alike toy called "Ritalin Man" to "help the medicine go down," a marketing ploy that should make us all cringe.

Yet Eberstadt claims that she doesn't want her book to make parents feel guilty, not exactly. "The purpose of these pages is not to ask what any one woman or man has decided to do. It is rather to ask what the accumulation of many millions of such decisions is doing to the children and adolescents of this society." Her hope is "to replace our current low moral bar regarding nurture with a more humane standard acknowledging that individuals and society would be better off if more parents spent more time with children."

That may indeed be happening, and not merely because mothers are once more becoming appropriately dutiful. I hope Eberstadt watched and was cheered by a recent 60 Minutes segment, reported by Lesley Stahl, which featured a group of highly educated women who had chosen to stay home full-time with their children. Their choice made a feminist who was interviewed during the segment furious, and seemed, to some degree, to confuse Stahl, a working-woman icon. But the mothers were sensible and tough-minded about what they had lost by making this choice and what they had gained. They didn't want their kids home alone, most of all because they wanted to be with them. They recognized the benefit not only for their children but for themselves. It is an argument Eberstadt never makes but one that would surely enhance her important, thought-provoking book.

Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies' Home Journal, is a contributor to National Review Online and author of Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness--and Liberalism--to the Women of America.