My Poor Children
Thursday, May 5th, 2005I don’t have any children right now.
But when the time comes for me to have children, one of my biggest fears is that they will suffer from ADHD.
I am definitely not ready to have children because I don’t know what I would do when they received the diagnosis. Would I take them to a psychiatrist early in life and have them go through therapy? Would I subject their developing little brains to harsh stimulant medication?
I do know that I would try to spend as much time with them as possible. I would want to give them every possible advantage of having a loving parent to help them with their classwork and homework.
I would buy many educational toys to help them with their concentration and memory. I would give them all the art supplies they wanted in order to encourage their creative thinking.
I guess I probably wouldn’t medicate them until they reached late high school or college. It would break my heart to see them struggle through school the way I did, though, so I don’t know if I could sit back and watch them suffer with their illness, knowing that medication existed and was available.
I knew I wasn’t normal when I was young, although I didn’t know what ADHD was until I was in middle or high school. Therapy might help my children understand the differences in their brains, but having the ADHD label might hurt their self-esteem.
Until I have a better idea of what I would do for my kids, I will not have children. I am not ready to bring up children and watch them suffer in the same way that I have always suffered.