1. In my essay I would like to answer the question: Why do most adults feel it is necessary for children to take medication to treat their ADHD and what are the ramifications of this?
2. The reason most adults feel the drive to “fix” children with ADHD is based from their need to control their lives, which includes those around them. The way they achieve this is through medicating their children so that they are easier to take care of. Having to deal with different situations or people makes a lot of individuals nervous, so when an opportunity presents itself, people will take advantage of the ability to get rid of that feeling. The effect this has on children is that they end up being less individualistic, in addition to having an unauthentic experience with those surrounding them.
3. I will be using Pratt’s “Art of the Contact Zone” and her ideas of the safe house and contact zone. Paulo Freire’s “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, the part where he talks about adults using any method necessary to control their children. And finally, John Taylor Gatto’s essay “Against Schools” where he talks about conformity and how adults attempt to make children conform to their will.
4. The texts I’m using are Pratt and Freire. I believe that these texts will expand my ideas because they both deal with the way that people interact with each other. My hypothesis and conversation are about how children with ADHD act and react around peers and other adults. It also addresses the opposite of that, how adults react to children that aren’t acting “normally” in accordance to the norms established by society.
5. I actually chose this article because of a documentary I watched a while back on ADHD on how parents are overmedicating their children to the point they’re taking dozens of pills a day. I want to explore because I’ve seen so many people my age diagnosed with it, which really didn’t have a problem in the first place. Personally I don’t believe ADD/HD is a disease as much as it is a bored child in class or a kid who’s parents don’t make that little extra effort necessary.
6. In my portfolio project I want to think more about WHY parents do this and what it means to the children. I want to narrow down my focus to just Pratt, Gatto and Freire because I think they’re the ones that really support my ideas the most. I don’t feel as though my essay 3 really got into depth about the importance of this issue and why it’s so important to people of my generation as they’re starting to have children of their own.
