Dear Mr. & Ms. Morgan,

Jasper has brought it to my attention that he does not have a graphing calculator.  Our Algebra II class is going to begin using graphing calculators heavily this upcoming week.  It is important for Jasper’s success in Algebra II for him to have a graphing calculator.

I understand that graphing calculators are an expensive purchase, but consider this an investment.  Jasper will continue to use it as he continues on into higher level math classes.  Please let me know if you cannot afford a graphing calculator because SPCPA wants to support your student in his education.

Thank you for your support.

Ms.McXXX

To which I was compelled to respond:

Ms.McXXX,

I think we may, indeed have a graphing calculator. If we don’t have one, we will purchase one, fear not. It will get lost within a few months, however, and we won’t buy another one, but probably find one in the lost and found. I know the drill.

I wish you hadn’t said that thing about it being an investment, because I have to say, I don’t actually think of this as an investment at all, but more a sort of unholy alliance the education system has forged with Texas Instruments. We have purchased (and lost) a multitude of such calculators over the years since our first son was in high school. Never have we or any of our children actually used such a device outside of high school classes. No one I know has. Ever.

My son isn’t college bound any time soon, so he won’t need it for his college classes, either. Personally I think the school should buy enough to mount on the math room tables or better yet, teach them how to find a good application on the internet, which is what they will be doing when they leave SPCPA, should they decide to engage in complicated math.

I don’t mean to take this out on you, I understand you need to run a uniform sort of ship or your job would be inordinately difficult. We will get a graphing calculator, forthwith and it will cost over $100.00 to get the model specified by the school. I get newly outraged every year when I have to do this. We are middle class folks. It isn’t a hardship for us, but for many of your students it really is. There’s something wrong with the system, here.

~lisa morgan

To me accessories imply a kind of grace, maturity, confidence, organization, put-togetherness….  I don’t know how to say it well. Someone who can wear a scarf on her head without having cancer implies a kind of attitude that says, “just for now, I’m able to live in the world and not in my own head.”An acceptance that you may or may  not be the main character, but you’re comfortable with your part on stage.  I find that in my life I’m frequently unable to get over even being on stage.

I went to my class on Thursday.  I ‘m the teacher.  When you teach adults, latino adults, especially, you have to think about your outfits in a way I’m not accustomed to.  Latinos have no problem telling you they like your skirt, or sweater or boots.  The men take it a step further, even.  And want to have a conversation about why American women dress the way they do.

There’s this back-handed insult/compliment thing they do. It goes something like this: “You looks rily pritty today.” I blush and say thanks, they continue, “How to say wear something nice?” I pause, “I think what you’re looking for is, “Dressed Up”. “mmm Dress-up? Why American women usually don’t wear emm, skirt and nice things? You like so much the jean and clothez not so nice like you have on now.”

They want to know why American women wear pants so often, why they wear clothes that are so loose, why they don’t wear heels.  They have no idea that complaining about the clothing of another person is inappropriate.  It’s unnerving. Or they tease each other, “You don’t paying attention, only focus on she skirt and boots.”

I try to dress up for my class.  I usually wear conservative or modest clothes.  More so when I taught Muslim students.  You don’t want to distract your students from the lesson plan by flashing your midriff  while you’re writing on the board.  I wore lots of jumpers when I taught the Somalis.

My current group is all Latinos.  Last week I wore knee-high boots and an asymmetrical skirt.  When my students showed up, the first woman to arrive told me I looked very nice, she liked my skirt and boots.  The first man to arrive complimented me as well.  Then the woman started making comments that she thought the  men weren’t paying attention to the lesson because they were too busy looking at me and my great outfit.

This week I had weird hair.  Hair so weird that I needed to wear a headband in order to disguise its weirdness.  The headband I picked out was very stretchy and tight.  It matched my outfit, which was a bonus.  I was a little nervous about it, because I’m not the kind of person who accessorizes without feeling self-conscious.  I had a nagging doubt about wearing it, but the problem is that I have a nagging doubt about almost everything I wear. If I wear most normal clothes, I feel confident, but constricted. The tags itch, the waistbands chafe or slide around. If I wear my comfies, which I do almost every day, I worry my husband will stop loving me. This is not as outrageous as it sounds, just ask him. If I wear dressy shoes, the noise they make makes me feel ostentatious.

Keep in mind, I haven’t even gotten to the place where I decide if I should accessorize. If I wear a scarf, it’s likely to migrate one way or the other. If I wear a hair ornament of some type, it might slide down the back of my pointy head, leaving me with very weird hair and a cloth band hanging from the back of my collar. Jewelry dangles into my food if I’m out, catches on things.

When I get those nervous feelings, I chide myself.  What am I so worried about? It’s a headband, not a scepter or crown.

I started teaching my class, which turned out to not be my classroom.  Someone had locked my actual classroom, so I moved into the next-door classroom.  I have started to wear dark colors when I teach, the better to not get white-board marker obviously all over myself.  The new classroom had no white board, but it did have a blackboard and chalk.  Not ideal, but it would work.

I began teaching.  As I did, I noticed my headband started to slowly, slowly creep backwards on my head.  This was concerning, but I yanked on it every two minutes or so and it went back into place.  It made it hard for me to think about what I was saying.  I was self conscious because I knew every time a teacher touches her hair or face, the students notice.  Every time she adjusts her clothes, they notice.

I was teaching about phrasal verbs, I think.  But I wasn’t focused on phrasal verbs.  I was focused on the headband slipping backwards on my head, getting smaller, smaller. .  I pulled it forwards a couple times, but that only seemed to speed up the process.

It’s hard to explain how disturbing a wardrobe malfunction is while one is in front of a group.  I talked verbs, answered questions.  I knew, though, and they knew that this headband was a mistake.  After about 30 minutes of clumsily surreptitious attempts to keep the damn thing in place, I finally pulled it off, tripled it up and used it as a pony-tail holder.  It was bad, but it stopped moving around and bothering us all.

This type of stupid event is what keeps me from wearing accessories

Sometimes when you wear a headband, it starts sliding around on your head. Sometimes it wants to return to it’s smaller, constricted state from the stretched out hair-holding state. A headband can ruin your night. I k now it seems like an overreaction. I know. But trust me when  tell you, the headband (or belt or scarf or jaunty ribbon) doesn’t want to serve you. It’s got its own life to lead.

You are mistaken if you think the scarf exists for you. You exist for the scarf or headband or belt. You exist to amuse these items. Headbands will slide back on your hair. Or maybe they’ll slide forward. Either way they’ll take whatevever semblance of style you thought you had with them.

She learns new things every day. You can tell when she gets something new because she makes a noise. It’s like an excited grunt. It’s funny coming from her pretty self. She also flaps her hands. We’ve grown fond of it and fond of her.

Today she was sniffling, which she does a lot because she’s allergic to cats, but she can’t resist them. I handed her the kleenex box and went off to put laundry away. When I came back, she was still sniffling, only it sounded like sad sniffles. I looked into the living room, “Sayuri?” Tilman was leaning towards her in a sympathetic way. He looked up and said, “She’s really sad.”

I came over and sat down next to her and hugged her. She cried louder. I called her honey and tried to comfort her. She leaned on my shoulder and said through tears, “I… Miss… Us.”

I’ll miss us, too.

Let  me tell you a little story. One that’s sweet and happy.  There’s plenty of sad and mad stories to be had.

We have this rental house about a half a mile away. We have been through the emotional and financial roller coaster that is rental property. The bad tenants outnumber the good ones, but the good ones stay longer. Our latest tenants came a few years ago.  T and B were close to my parents’ age. Fifties and early sixties. He worked the night in the laundry of a local hospital, she had various part-time gigs, but kept herself busy in productive ways full time.

The lot next door had been used as a community garden before we bought the  property (we own both lots, the garden lot and the house for T and B).  We opted to keep allowing the neighborhood garden club to use the space when we bought it, but it had its own ups and downs. It was starting to be overgrown and not that well tended by the time B and T moved in.

B has a sort of free-spirit, flower-child charisma that captivates people.  She has a degree in horticulture and has kept bees. T went along affably with whatever she wanted. They had two dogs, one rottweiler, one pit bull. Together they formed what I liked to think of as a sort of hamburger factory. I pitied the fool who tried to take these two on. They liked me and my people, and I suspect they liked anyone B and T liked. In addition to the doggies, there are 3 cats, one with just one eye, who goes by the name of pirate. Living things loved this couple.

B took over coordinating the garden club and under her touch and inspiration, it flourished. She didn’t necessarily coordinate everything. She sure didn’t actually do it herself, but she made things happen. A local tree trimmer started bringing mulch, nurseries donated bushes and plants every year, people built raised beds, manure was donated and brought in.  I swear, animals came from far and wide to be near this woman.

T was a musician in his heart. We left our piano in the house and he played it almost every day. He had been kind of a rough character a while back, but had always been a good man with a good heart. He had settled into a rhythm of married life, if a slightly odd one. He slept late into the day so he could work his night shift.

T took care of B and he took care of her. She remembered things needed to get done, he made her dinner. They sweated it out in the garden every year. As the years passed, we kept their rent the same, although it didn’t quite cover the mortgage and certainly didn’t cover expenses. They were just so good for the neighborhood and were truly embedded in the house. They treated it as if it were their home. Because it was. It is.

Last summer we painted over a spot that had peeled, but didn’t get an exact match on the color. It made a dark blob on the back of the house. Within 3 days, B had traced it on paper and named it a “Carrot-nosed sprite dancing and playing the accordion” She sent the tracing along with the rent check. All of her rent checks came enclosed in a letter, maybe two pages, maybe three. Exclamation points, pictures, smiley faces and stars punctuated every letter. They detailed the wildlife that had come to their yard (turkeys, possums, crows, a white squirrel… Whatever cool thing happened, she kept us apprised of.  In addition to the letters with the rent, they always paid the rent a week or two early. I remember calling their last landlord when they applied to be renters and asked if they were good tenants. His answer didn’t make sense at the time. He sais, “They were great tenants. Almost too great. So great you might not believe it”

When T got sick early this spring, they thought it was his gallstones and diabetes, but it wasn’t. It was pancreatic cancer. I got the news from B in the alley as I was leaving from some repair work (Just so everyone knows working the night shift is a risk factor for pancreatic and a host of other cancers. Night shift work is bad for people, they should be aware of this and paid accordingly, whatever that means in a job market where any job is a blessing. )

In any case, T was going to die within months. I don’t think he even made it through his second round of chemo. They sent him home to consider his options.  B was bereft from the moment of the diagnosis. They had eked  out a life they really loved. Every time I saw them I heard how grateful they were to be living in a place where their animals could be with them, where they had a chance to help things live.

I got a call one day while T was sick. B was crying. People had been saying that she would have to find another place to live, that the house was too big for her, that she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent.  She was having trouble catching her breath, but she wanted me to know, no matter what people said, she didn’t want to move out. She’d figure out how to stay, but please, would I promise she wouldn’t have to move out when T died. Of course she wouldn’t have to move out. She assured me she had enough money to stay until the beginning of the year if rent stayed the same. We had discussed a small increase before T got sick. I assured her, she didn’t have to go anywhere, that she should take care of herself and her husband. I didn’t want to hear another thing about it until the end of the summer. At that time we’d reevaluate, and if they couldn’t afford it, we wouldn’t raise the rent.  We have a pretty open relationship. I trust she won’t try to rip me off, and she trusts me with the same thing. Somehow this works.

We put in a couple of new windows last fall and were trying to budget a time to replace a couple more, when the city fire inspection found other things to be m ore important.  One thing he wanted us to do was scrape and paint the exterior. This was on the plan for later in the summer anyway, but with the other repairs, it was looking less and less likely.  We power-washed and scraped so the house would pass inspection (no huge peeling chunks), but it looked so, so sad. The house was a monkey-shit color to begin with, but when it was power-washed and scraped it became monkey-shit with giant white and peach colored splotches.

Right before the inspector came, I got a call from one of the neighbors who was also a member of the garden club. He and the other gardeners had heard that we were cutting T and B a deal on the rent. I assume she told them. The members of the club wanted to know if I could buy paint let them volunteer to help get the house scraped and painted.  They wanted to do it for us because it would make B’s life better and they respected our willingness to flex with her.

T died about a week after that offer was made. People arrived on a Sunday morning to help work on the sad and lonely house.  I got goosebumps many times in the next few weeks. At one point we had 5 volunteers helping to scrape and paint. Gardeners who couldn’t help with painting brought us fried chicken and homemade desserts.  The house is mostly painted, except for the highest dormer.  We feel so very blessed to have been a part of this whole thing.

Well the worst thing I can usually conjure up is some sort of unmitigated stress and interpersonal conflict, the ensuing inability to function as a group and resulting bad grade. My group mates were all over 30, so that was a plus. I breathed a little easier. The topic was one I knew something about, having studied it before. The due date was towards the end of the semester, so we had time and were able to watch the examples of other groups.It probably would be fine.

We had our first meeting Jessica’s parents’ house. It was conveniently located just blocks from my own home, on Summit Avenue. The house was a mansion, beautifully appointed. We retired to the kitchen to work. My spirit sagged when Jessica didn’t turn off the e local pop station’s morning show while we discussed the  project. She confided in us, “This is one of my few guilty pleasures. I love this morning show.” I think many people wouldn’t get the sense of doom I got upon hearing this. I happen to be miserably incompetent paying attention to the correct auditory stimulus when there are competing options. I get dumber and crabbier the longer I’m in this type of environment. I rallied my self and looked hard at my notes while Dave and the Morning Crew yucked it up about some off-color or culturally insensitive skit.

The second sense of impending disaster was when Jessica opened up her computer and started to talk fast, “I’m just learing how to do this new format for presentations. It’s really cool. I spent hours with it yesterday after work. I input a bunch of the information you sent me. Let’s just take a look at it, Ok?It’s called Prezi. You’re going to love it. It is so cool. I’ll do all the input and arrangement, if you just send me information.”  Ann and I looked at each other and shrugged. I asked, “How will we help do the presentation if we don’t know how to use this program?”  Well, it was really cool! Jessica would handle putting our info in. We just had to give her the data! Plus, she had already entered all the data we had sent her, and some of her own. She was calling up the presentation she had so far.

Prezi is kind of cool. If you like slide presentations. And you’re not prone to motion sickness. And you like flashy presentations and special effects. She showed us what she had so far. The slides zoomed in and out from one to the other, spun into a spiral, faded in and out, twirled and wobbled. I started to feel sick when the first slides started to spin and disappear as if the information was going down a drain. The next few zoomed up and away, in and out. It was surely flashy.

Ann and I decided (this was possibly a mistake) to let Jessica handle the Prezi aspect of the project. What could go wrong? By the time we left her house, we had divided up the subject and went off on our way to analyze our parts and send them off to Jessica to be swirled and popped into the powerpoint deal. She explained that she worked a lot and so might not get stuff done until late at night.

We had a week and one more meeting before our presentation was due. We fired stuff off to Jessica, looked at each other’s data on  google-docs.  Every email from Jessica had at least one reference to her having to be at work, come home from work, leave for work or get up early before she worked. We discussed contradictory or repeated data and sympathized with Jessica about her work schedule. About 9 pm before our last meeting at the library Jessica sent  an email with an attachment linking to what she had entered into Prezi so far.  The next morning we all met at the library, laptops and notes at the ready. Jessica asked if I had gone through the presentation  yet. I hadn’t. I said no, but I was looking forward to going through it at this meeting.  We sat in a small meeting room in the library and started to talk through the planned presentation.

There was a sticking point regarding a video clip. Two video clips, actually. Together they were about 15 minutes of our 30 minute limit. Ann and I thought we should try to pare down the video clips to about 5 minutes. Jessica stiffened a little, but kept smiling. “I don’t really care, but I think it covers really important stuff.” We agreed that it did, but that our actual slides and narration covered the same data. We went though a few more things where Ann and I needed to correct something or point out where data was duplicated. We shuffled stuff around and came back to the video clips.

Jessica kept saying she didn’t care about how we did it in the end, but she wasn’t actually making any changes. She looked at the screen, then pursed her lips. “I don’t want to be rewd, but I think it kind of sucks that neither one of you watched the presentation last night. I worked really hard on it and it hurts my feelings that you didn’t even look at it.”  Ann apologized immediately. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I thought that was what we were meeting to do this morning.”

I explained that I thought the same thing. Ann said, “But as long as we’re clearing the air. I’m pretty bothered that you didn’t even include the 4 graphics I made. I worked hard on those and they aren’t even in the presentation. I don’t really care, but I sent them to you for a reason.”

Ahh, yes, the armpit tingle and facial flush. Nobody cares, but everyone is upset. We were supposed to present the following day. We Had To Work Together. Jessica was on the verge of angry tears, Ann had her arms crossed. We pulled ourself together and got our game plan set up. Jessica had to leave early so she could get back to work. She assured us she’d work on it after she got home from work at ten that night and before she had to work at 7 the next morning. The following day we were going to present to the class.

Class started at 430. We were the main event.

You should sympathize with Mike.  He teaches Chemistry and Calculus.  He’d just have to brush up a little, right? Right. He had no idea what he was in for. To be fair, neither did I. The questions I have about Statistics are very basic.  Without going too far into it, I’ll try to explain.

We were dealing with bell curves when I arrived. Bell curves and hypothesis testing. Zscores, Tscores, and rejection regions.  One of the questions I had was what’s under the line of the curve. Is that all people? is it answers? Is it  confidence? When I’m doing means testing and I come up with an answer, (1.684 for example) where is that answer on the curve? Is it on the line? or in the hump of the curve.

Mike would get confused about my questions. Sometimes when he got confused he’d smile and shake his head. Sometimes he’d pinch the bridge of his nose. Sometimes he’d say, “What do you mean?” Seemed pretty basic to me. Sometimes he’d answer and his answer would be wrong. Mike didn’t admit being wrong. Even when he made me miss two questions on my midterm with his wrong-ass answers.

He got confused when I asked what a certain kind of equation or theory told us about the real world. There’s this thing you can do with graphs and taking the means of a group of means.Sampling distribution of the sample means, it’s called, I think. You can do a little example of it if you want here.  If you do it enough, even a very bizarrely irregular dataset will become regularized.  I wanted to know why it was useful to take something so unusual and make it look regular. You could have a really unusual distribution, little peaks and valleys or two big peaks, whatever. If you run it through this process of equations, it would become a normal curve which you could then use to learn stuff.

How does that not use manipulation of data to tell a lie? Well, if I was describing it right, it sounded like my stats professor was maybe wrong. He couldn’t say he didn’t know. Especially when he didn’t know. He spent about 25% of my/his time/money flipping through my stats book. Shit, I can look up stuff in the book for free myself.

I gave him an example (one that jumped to mind) of a therapeutic intervention that you wanted to test. Say you have a therapy that you think will reduce the number of some hand-flapping tic in the kids in your special ed classroom. You want to test your therapy against a control group. In the control group you do nothing and measure the number of hand flaps one day and the next day. In your experimental group, let’s say you cut off all the hands of the children.  You count the hand flaps one day, cut the hands off and then count the hand flaps the day after that. Your results should be pretty drastic. It won’t look like any kind of a curve.  It will be a kind of block showing all the kids with total absence of flapping behavior. If you run that block shaped graph through this special process enough times, the block (in theory), will become normalized to look like a bell curve.  Then you can analyze the curve in all sorts of useful ways.

For whatever reason, Mike got stuck on the amputation of the hands on the kids in my experimental group and he was at a loss to explain to me the theoretical explanation. I really needed someone who knew enough about the subject that they wouldn’t get distracted by my weird examples. Mike wasn’t the guy. “Can we make it something else? like we tied their hands down?” Sure we could, but I still wanted to know how the new curve could really be useful to analyze anything in the real world. Isn’t that what statistics is supposed to do?

His fate was sealed when I changed the answer to a question because of what he told me, and got it back marked incorrect. The right answer was the one I had first. I didn’t go back, but I think I passed the class anyway.

My family here seems to find this story amusing. It has no plot, really, just me and the ducks. It’s more a story of place, you know like a Steig Larsen book or something. Haunting landscape and deep connection to the topography and all that.

I was at the good will, as I am wont to go from time to time. I was on a mission. The mission, as I recall it, involved self-loathing and the hunt for a good pair of jeans. It involved trying on no fewer than 9 pairs of jeans. Trying on jeans is hard work. I found one pair, but they turn out to be the kind of jeans that stretch as you wear them, maybe they’re made of a kind of butter-based-polymer or something.  As they get warm they start to sag and create a sort of skirt with legs, with the crotch causing a denim ridge to form all the way around the point just above my saddle-bags. Shoot… you don’t want to hear my jeans story. Trying on clothes is about as interesting as listening to someone’s cat story.

Unless it’s me. Because my cat stories are fascinating. But I digress from the duck story. I left the good will with one pair of jeans, a couple shirts for Zach and some fiestaware saucers (issues).  The Goodwill parking lot is across the street from the actual store. The lot butts up against University avenue (where I have had a few misadventures in the past)(monument story, dropping boards story). University Avenue is currently the site of some gigantic construction in preparation for the controversial light rail line to go through. I am torn on the light rail, because I loves me some mass transit, but I understand how people are upset about exactly where it goes, how many stops it has and how it gets paid for. In any case, the parking lot is on Univeristy avenue, which is the busiest street in Saint Paul except maybe Snelling.

So there’s nothing quaint about this section of Saint Paul. Nothing idillic or darling about this junky parking lot overlooking the heavy machinery and pylons. Nothing quaint except for the Perfect and perfectly still Mallard Duck sitting in the back of the lot. Now, you never know what you might find at the Goodwill, but this was just a little weird. Somebody’s decoy? But no! I saw his head move. For Sure. I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve been fooled by those plastic geese and ducks with the bobbling heads or the wind-sock bodies, but I this was a real, live animal. Packed up my stuff in the car and got in. I decided I’d better go and talk to the duck, though. I mean, he didn’t really belong there, did he? Was he lost? Was he hurt? Was he tame?

I drove to the far end of the parking lot where the duck was. I parked about 3 spaces over from where he was parked. When opened my car door he decided to get up and walk a few steps. He was decidedly real. I got out just to say hi. I don’t know why, but it was just so unusual to see this beautiful little animal sitting in a parking space. His colors were bright like a caricature  of a duck, bright green head and purple wing stripe. He was gorgeous and I needed to say hi to him. Just to check in. There he was on Uni alone.

Except he wasn’t alone. When I spoke to him the hen, who had been sitting perfectly still near the chain link fence, got up and moved towards him.  She stopped and looked at me and took an enormous gooey poop, after which the two of them waddled a few more spaces away from me. I got the message. I moved on.

Witnessing the righteous indignation of my classmates after they watched the Frontline documentary about overmedicated kids I’ve come to realize how much being in the trenches as a mom has taught me.  Things it would be good for future therapists to know. I’m trying to write a rant that would actually benefit them and their clients (parents and children).  I’m having trouble coming up with something that isn’t totally vitriolic. Listen to a 22 year old talk about “Parents just need to get up off the couch and do the real parenting” or “Obviously the kid is learning that behavior from someone” or “parents should really try to do more with diet and environment”… Listen to that and think about  who you’ll be asking to help your frayed family.

Dear Psychology Grad-Tommies,

I know you’re smart. I know you want to help. I’m a parent. The vast majority of you are not. It shows. Realizing these few things will help you be a better provider. I realize that most of you are not parents yourself, and as such you are understandably ignorant of what really happens in a family from any perspective but that of a child. Parents have always been blamed for anything their children do or are that is unacceptable. This has happened forever. It’s not new, but it is old. Let me point out a few things that might have escaped your radar.

• Most of you have no idea what it’s like to have a child at all, much less one who has a mental health problem. Stop judging long enough to listen.
• If we (as parents) didn’t go and ask for help for our kids and keep insisting until something (meds or other) worked, in the unlikely event that the kid snapped, you’d all be shaking your heads and asking why we didn’t do something more.
• Frontline has a good reputation, but never trust the media so much that you don’t question the editing of a piece such as the one you just finished watching.Remember that although PBS has excellent credibility, they are producing shows to get watchers. You have no idea what was edited out and how things were spliced together.
• 30 years ago there was absolutely nothing that could be done for a troubled child. The suicide rate was significantly higher than it is now. When teenagers started on the SSRIs, the suicide rate started to decline. When the big scare about antidepressants and suicide in teenagers hit the press, parents pulled back on allowing their children to be medicated. The suicide rate skyrocketed just afterwards

• Don’t believe every thing you think, everything you’ve been told and certainly not everything you see on a TV documentary or pharmaceutical company presentation.
• It is just as likely (in fact, there is evidence) that the parenting style you are blaming for a child’s problems is in fact a response by the parent to the child’s problems. This is how we got the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism. It was bunk.
• It is just as likely (in fact there is compelling evidence) that the adult you are treating for a mental health issue, the one who remembers being bullied or being leered at, or having a distant father or an overbearing mother, it is just as likely that this person is remembering things from a skewed perspective and focusing on the negative. That adult with a full flown mental problem was once a child with a budding mental health problem.
• It’s very likely that the simple parenting skills (parenting 101) you are sure would solve the problems of an obviously spoiled or neglected child have already been tried by the parents you have judged to be incompetent. Most parents who are to the point of bringing a child into the clinic have tried the obvious (ignore the pleas for attention, give more attention, talk to the child more, make consequences clear, set clear limits, pick battles, etc.). Notice how many of those are contradictory. Know what that’s usually a sign of? Bullshit guesses.
• Feel free to doubt the efficacy of medical treatment for mental health problems in childhood, because 30 years ago we didn’t have any of these drugs or any of these problems, right? Except maybe we did have the problems. And maybe we used to marginalize, institutionalize, bully, jail or tranquilize these kids because it was the best we could do. It was the best we could do. And it wasn’t good enough.
• Feel free to maintain that it’s unethical to try treating kids with adult medications, but try explaining that to a mother who grew up in a family with a history of mental health train-wrecks. Train wrecks people for generations could predict from about kindergarten. Sure, generations of that family were just fine without medications (or even psychotherapy) in childhood. But they weren’t.

Not all troubled kids need medication, but rather than making up your mind that no children should be medicated, try opening your mind. They aren’t little adults, but they are little people. When little people can’t see, we get their eyes checked and get the little glasses if they need them. When little people have asthma, we treat them with real drugs. Of course we check their environments to see what else can be done, but we don’t judge parents who carry inhalers for their kids. Nor do we deign to judge them when the inhaler isn’t enough. But the minute a kid who is (or isn’t) medicated snaps and hurts someone, we all turn to scrutinize the parents. Do you know why?

If we’re not parents, I think we do it because we still blame many of our problems on our parents (although I’m not sure we’re always so generous with credit for our successes). If we are parents, we do it because the thought that our child might be capable of evil terrifies us, and we want to distance ourselves from this family. Not that we shouldn’t investigate every aspect of a catastrophically failed life. But we shouldn’t be so sure we know where to assign blame.

Pharmaceutical companies have too great an influence on doctors and parents. This is almost indisputable if you look at the data. Many kids are overmedicated. Many adults are overmedicated. Too many are medicated instead of getting therapy or lifestyle change. They should be getting all of it.