It might be trite and a cliché, but that doesn’t diminish the truth of the adage that the toughest job you will ever have is being a parent. The stakes are astronomically high. And it’s a difficult, messy job. As the comedian Ray Romano said, “having children is like living in a frat house – nobody sleeps, everything’s broken and there’s a lot of throwing up.”

It’s never been easy to be a parent. But today’s parents are dealing with concerns and issues that prior generations couldn’t even fathom. The complex society in which we live has put stressors on parenthood that were nonexistent only a few years ago.

“Mama” in Distracted knows all about those stressors. She’s trying to raise her son in the digital age. She’s trying to find a diagnosis for her son. She’s trying to be a good spouse and friend at the same time. And she’s wondering if she isn’t somehow responsible for the difficulties her son is facing.

Technology has always been a double-edged sword. But today’s parents have more worries about it. In a recent New York Times article by Nick Bilton, his sister confessed her guilt to him about having her four and seven year olds use iPads at the table: “I don’t want to give them the iPads at the dinner table, but if it keeps them occupied for an hour so we can eat in peace, and more importantly not disturb other people in the restaurant, I often just hand it over. . . Do you think it’s bad for them?”¹

Bilton doesn’t have a good answer for her. But is using the iPad that different from handing the child a coloring book and a crayon? Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and Catalyst Collaborative@MITguest scholar for Distracted, thinks “maybe not.” She says, “conversations with each other are the way children learn to have conversations with themselves, and learn how to be alone. Learning about solitude and being alone is the bedrock of early development, and you don’t want your kids to miss out on that because you’re pacifying them with a device.”²

Aside from the technology of our fast-paced lives, Mama is dealing specifically with the issue of whether her son has ADD, and if so, what to do about it.  Again, there are no easy answers. Arguments have raged for years around the issues of diagnoses and treatment. Part of the problem seems to be that some people believe this is a particularly modern ailment; that kids in previous generations weren’t treated for attentional disorders and they turned out just fine. Psychologist Russell Barkley points out that that may not be the case:  “Many people in the public ask, ‘Where were these kids when I was growing up? I’ve never heard of this before.’ Well, these kids were there. They were the class clowns. They were the juvenile delinquents. They were the school dropouts. They were the kids who quit school at 14 or 15 because they weren’t doing well. But they were able to go to work on their parents’ farm, or they were able to go out and get in a trade or get into the military early. So they were out there. Back then, we didn’t have a professional label for them. We preferred to think of them more in moral terms. They were the lazy kids, the no-good kids, the dropouts, the delinquents, the lay-about ne’er-do-wells who were doing nothing with their life. Now we know better. Now we know that it is a real disability, that it is a valid condition, and that we shouldn’t be judging them so critically from a moral stance.”³ 

As the playwright George S. Kaufman once noted, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” So, assuming that Mama’s son Jesse really does have a problem, what does she do about it?

Medication becomes a seriously thorny issue for parents. We medicate our children at roughly ten times the rate of Great Britain, for instance, and there is a lot of discussion and controversy out there about why and whether we should be doing it. Journalist Bronwen Hruska dealt with the same issues as Mama, and notes, “I’ve found that once you start looking for a problem, someone’s going to find one, and attention deficit has become the go-to diagnosis, increasing by an average of 5.5 percent a year between 2003 and 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of 2010, according to the National Health Interview Survey, 8.4 percent, or 5.2 million children, between the ages of 3 and 17 had been given diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”⁴

So, part of Mama’s dilemma is that the issue is out there in the zeitgeist. But that still doesn’t solve what to do about her child.  Psychiatrist Peter Breggin discusses this: “In America today, it’s easy to go out and get glowing testimony from parents about how wonderfully their children have been doing on Ritalin. There was a caged animal, a polar bear, in the zoo in Toronto, who was pacing up and down and looking uncomfortable, and looking like he’d really like to go back to the Arctic or the Antarctic. And they put him on Prozac, and he stopped pacing. His name was Snowball. He sat quietly and looked happy. And animal rights people gathered to the zoo and protested the drugging of a polar bear to make him into a good caged animal, and he was taken off the drug.”⁵

So, what’s a mother to do? Does she want a drugged child who resembles a “happy” polar bear, or not? Compounding her dilemma is that no matter which decision Mama makes, someone is going to fault her for it. In a world where poor people who got mortgages were blamed for the financial collapse, she’s damned if does and damned if she doesn’t.

It’s enough to make you want to be distracted.

1. Bilton, Nick. “The Child, the Tablet and the Developing Mind.” The New York Times. March 31, 2013.

2. Ibid.

3. Barkley, Russell, quoted in “Does ADHD Exist?” by Fred Baughman. Retrieved on 4/11/13; www.pbs.org/frontline/20/7C/20pbs.webarchive.

Hruska, Bronwen. “Raising the Ritalin Generation.” The New York Times. August 18, 2012.

4. Breggin, Peter, quoted in “Does ADHD Exist?” by Fred Baughman. Retrieved on 4/11/13; www.pbs.org/frontline/20/7C/20pbs.webarchive.