Michelle Gale on Rethinking How We Educate Our Kids
My youngest is going through a hard stretch right now. Something is happening with auditory processing, and we don't have a full diagnosis yet. Testing is coming up. It's stressful, and it aches, but we landed somewhere that's genuinely willing to work with him. When he hits a wall during the day, his teacher will tell him to run out to the board on the playground and run back, and he lets him go do it. During math groups, he'll pull him aside to work on his own, because the layered sounds of a group get to be too much.
In his classroom last year there was a balance board. A kid could get up, set a tiny timer, wiggle on the board for sixty seconds, then head back to their seat. Those are small things, and they matter.
Think about when school was built. The structure came from an era that didn't really fit children then either, though parenting looked nothing like it does now. It was stricter back then. Kids weren't carrying the kind of brightness and energy they carry today, and they certainly weren't expected to have opinions. The children we have now are a different generation entirely, and most of them are spending the day in classrooms that ask them to stay seated from start to finish.
So what tends to happen is medication. I've talked with plenty of parents who feel heavy pressure to medicate even though they don't want to. There are other roads to take. There's also the option of simply tolerating these kids, holding space for them through the day, and bending the environment a little to meet them.
There's a good amount of research showing that when children start on these medications early, it often opens the door to more symptoms and more diagnoses down the line. For a lot of kids it turns into a lifetime of labels, symptoms, and additional prescriptions stacked on top of each other.
Sometimes medication is the right call. I'm not a doctor, and I won't pretend to know where that line sits. But I'd say we reach for the pills awfully fast. If we were willing to really examine how we teach children, what we put them inside of all day, and how we might actually support them, I think we'd find a lot of room for accommodation instead. Boys especially.