Claudia Meininger Gold, writing in the Boston Globe, offers an alternative to psychotropic drugs for children. She says parents need help accepting and understanding their children with attention and behavior problems. If parents can manage their own frustration with their children, she says, they can better help children manage their behavior.

Too often, she says, children are put on medications for reasons having to do with pharmaceutical marketing, time constraints on primary care doctors, and “our society’s expectation of a quick fix.”

Studies have shown that a parent’s capacity to think about and understand a child’s experience from the child’s perspective is associated with a child’s increased cognitive resourcefulness, greater social skills, and better capacity to regulate emotions. Healthcare policy, and the education of pediatricians and mental health professionals, must move toward giving our full support to parents of young children in this way. Only then can we hope to improve the mental health of the next generation.

Claudia Meininger Gold is a pediatrician in Great Barrington, MA

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under ADHD, attention deficit disorder, behavior, NOT2BEMISSED, parents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.