parents ages 35 - 55 (warning: controversial)

[Pippen]

Start listing the past and present geniuses the world would have never known had their parents doped them up on speed to control their thoughts and behaviors.

Perhaps so but the list that will never be known is the one of the past and present geniuses who the world will never know because they are/were not functional in our world.

Enrico Fermi did his upper level college work with a very gifted group of men. But the most brilliant of all of them was never known to most of the world because he couldn't funtion in it. His name was Ettore Majorana and he was truly a math genius, a human calculator, and a gifted mathemetician. A story is told by Fermi's wife that once he and Fermi held a race to see who could work out a problem. Fermi used a slide rule, pencil, and paper. Majorana used only his mind and they came out even. He worked out Heisenberg's theory of the nucleus of the atom before H. did but never published that or other significant works because he could not let strangers pry into his mind. He couldn't teach, he couldn't publish, he couldn't live in the world, and one day sailed away never to be heard from again.

My son is not on the level of Fermi or Majorana but he learned to read on his own when he was two and by 3 1/2 could read about anything we set before him. At 4 he was doing things like diagraming the human digestive system and labelling it correctly from memory. He can whip his brother several years his senior in spelling with two hands tied behind his back and is quicker than I am at simple mental math calculations. All of those gifts didn't mean squat when he was stuck (as he was for a time) hiding under the bed because he was too terrified to leave the house or came home everyday in a rage because he couldn't handle the outside world. Brains without the ability to function on a basic level in life have serious limitations. I'd move heaven and earth--and use meds if necessary--if everything else I did had failed to give my kid some peace in his own mind and the ability to live within his own skin. With all due respect to the brilliance, functioning and a reasonable degree of contentment are the top priorities I'm shooting for.

Meds certainly aren't my route of choice, however, and hopefully won't be necessary in the future. I volunteer a lot of time helping parents of young children with behavioral issues obtain the information and skills they need to hopefully avoid them but I also recognize there are times when nothing else works.

[MartyNeilan]

"spowerts"

Spowerts???????????

Can't find that one in my redneck dictionary, please enlighten???
PM is OK if it is too controversial.

[MartyNeilan]

<img src="http://i1.tinypic.com/s58ydv.jpg">

Ah-Hah!

I had a guy come up to me the other day and ask me if I played golf. I looked him straight in the eye and told him I played tuba. He walked away thinking I was nuts.

Marty "who knows that golf isn's a real sport unless you get to tackle the other golfers or draft behind their golf carts" Neilan

[prototypedenNIS]

I was on Ritalin... bad news... depression... suicidal

I'd probably punch out a teacher if they said my child should be on it too.

[prototypedenNIS]

Oh yeah... I'm a very happy person now that I'm not on Ritalin.

[LoyalTubist]

Being the well-traveled person that I am, and very interested in knowing what people do to pass time, there are some interesting observations pertaining to this post I can state.

1. The United States is the only country where poor people are overweight. While they may be techncally malnourished, they are obese. In most Asian cultures, fat is seen as the sign of achieving something in life.

2. American restaurants serve the biggest portions of food in the world. If you get a chance to go to Europe, Australia, or Asia, compare the size of their Whopper® or Big Mac® with an American one. I remember in Indonesia, at McDonald's, all the food was on about a 3/4 scale, including the regular hamburgers and fish sandwiches.

3. The rest of the world watches the United States. Their children emulate American children. When I taught school in Indonesia, many of the kids I taught tried to act like the kids they saw on TV in U.S. sitcoms and dramas. Many of the kids on TV just sat around (Indonesia only got the TV shows, the U.S. didn't want to keep--we got the sitcom that Lyle Alzado did, a few years after he died.)

4. The study of nutrition is a relatively new field of study. In my study of popular history, I have gleaned that it wasn't so important what you were eating, so long as you were full when you finished.

5. Also, from my study of popular history, the healthiest the United States ate as a nation was in the 1950s and 1960s. Sugar was not so much a part of the diet then. If a child wanted to eat something sweet, he or she would go to the local malt shop and get only one thing. Now, thanks to mega-stores, such as Sam's Club and Costco, we have the contents of what an entire grocer in 1933 had in our individual homes. That in itself leads to many of these problems.



Now I am only stating these things as observations, not criticisms. I mean I represent almost everything unhealthy on this list. I mean, I can remember in school one year they said, "It doesn't matter what you eat for breakfast, so long as you eat and get full." A few years later they denounced all the sugar we were eating.

Now, I am afraid of the idea of censoring what we eat, as some of the more political bloggers have stated in other pages on other sites. But we can teach good nutrition the same way we teach about the evils of smoking.

[prototypedenNIS]

what I've seen that causes disasters for those dealing with kids with ADD or ADHD, it isn't sugar.


Red food colouring.

[LoyalTubist]

I don't know about that, but I am feeling sleepy.