What do Sir Richard Branson, The “Fonz” and Sir Anthony Hopkins all have in Common? They were all once considered stupid.  But they were all able to turn this around and become an outrageous success.

Is your child the next “outrageous success”? There is a misconception floating around today that, children who have boundless energy, apparently short attention spans and a disregard for “traditional schooling” need to be drugged, sedated, and controlled in order for them to “succeed” in life. But what if they aren’t ADD/ADHD at all?

What if they were highly intelligent and absorbed information in record time (hence they get bored and move on quickly)? What then? Are we, as parents who feel overwhelmed by our offspring’s drive and energy, responsible for the loss of a whole generation of brilliant, eccentric, and powerful leaders? I believe so. Not from malicious intent, but from a lack of understanding.

Our children are not like us. They aren’t polite little robots that don’t question the way things are. They question, they argue, they point out our mistakes, and they make us feel inadequate. They aren’t disrespectful – they just don’t take the B.S. of previous generations. They know that age doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom. They understand that what they know is as important, if not more important than what we know. They are in touch with their feelings and they feel rage. Rage at what we’ve done to our planet, our children, our futures. They see us stubbornly clinging to outdated and outmoded habits and traditions and they question its validity.

For this we punish them, drug them. We inhibit their drive and their passion. We force them to become mindless drones. By drugging them we sentence them to death. The drugs we give them to help them “focus and sit still” lead to addictions to some of the hardest, nastiest drugs around. We mask what we view as a “problem” – yet we don’t have the balls to look at the cause and acknowledge that these kids are right to be angry and bouncing off the walls.

Humans weren’t designed to live on a diet of artificial food. Yet most of our food contains elements that in their undisguised state none of us would willingly put in our mouths. We are deceived about the safety and the effectiveness of man’s inventions. We have lost touch with the heart and soul of our planet. We have lost touch with our need to move and be outdoors.

Our children remind us of what we have lost. We are meant to have their energy and sitting still was the last thing we were meant to do. Lightening fast absorption of information and stimuli, plus instinctive awareness of the “rightness” of that information is our birthright. Our children are reminding us of what we have forgotten, and it doesn’t sit well with us. We don’t like being awakened from our slumber. We don’t like looking at the problems our societies have created.

We would rather stay asleep and unaware, blaming large corporations and others for the misfortunes befalling our planet. We don’t want to take responsibility, to shoulder the blame and actually take action to fix the problem. Our children sense our dishonesty, our reluctance to be responsible, our desire to lay blame. They see us squandering our birthright, our reluctance to wake up and change the status quo. And we ask them to respect us, to follow our suggestions.

Let’s be honest for a moment. If the people leading us were obviously being dishonest(by denying who and what they are), denying others their basic rights and then drugging us into submission when we protested their treatment of us – would we feel any less rage than our children? Would we respect them and blindly follow? I don’t think so. Wars have been fought over those very things. We all still shudder when we think of Adolf Hitler with his Holocaust and Stalin and the Gulags. Yet aren’t we doing the same thing to our children?

I believe so. We are killing them. Crushing their innate gifts, drowning their sensitivities to chemicals and man-made food, and dulling their lightening fast thinking style with drugs and mindless repetitions of what has come before. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting a different result. Isn’t that what we are doing with our children? Aren’t we using the same education system, the same parenting system that got us into this mess in the first place?

Yet somehow we are hoping that our children will come along and save us. Save us from our own folly, our own inaction, our own unwillingness to take responsibility. Yet when they demonstrate the very traits that will save us, save our planet and save our future, we have the knee jerk reaction of drugging them. Frightened by their intensity, by their drive, by their willingness to rock the boat, we react instead of respond. We rush to the doctor saying “fix him/her, there is something wrong with this child – they make me feel uncomfortable, they make me feel inadequate”. The doctor looks at this precious gift, this precious hope for our future and also feels threatened. He/she reaches for their prescription pad and next thing we know this beautiful gift, this saving grace is drugged, controlled, manipulated and taken out of the equation. How many children will we lose before we realise that they are our way forward? That we need to adapt to them not the other way around?

Too many. Too many will feel the sting of labels assigned them and experience the trauma of being drugged in order to “fit” society. Too many will pay the price for our stubborn refusal to take responsibility.

Yet, all is not lost. Our children love us still, and with the right approach to parenting and education, we can help our children become the leaders, the game changers, the way forward. What our children need – what we need – is for us to ask the questions “Does this serve us? Is this good for one – good for all?”

Can we honestly say that drugging our children is something we would want done to us? Would we want our boss to come along and say “John your behaviour doesn’t fit the company so, what we are going to do is drug you against your will, then you will fit the way we think you should be.”Acceptable to you? I don’t think so.

Stay tuned – in the next article I will discuss what can be done to help our children without resorting to drugs or other forms of manipulation.

Diana Vogel