by Isobel J.

Created on: July 06, 2010

It seems that the prevalence of childhood mental disorders has been increasing in the past ten to fifteen years. Experts are unsure if this is due to the fact that we know more about childhood disorders and more parents are seeking treatment for their children than ever before, if the occurrence of these disorders in children is increasing, if it is a combination of these two factors or if there is an entirely different explanation altogether.

When considering medication for their children, parents generally fall on a continuum of concern and willingness. On one end, we have parents who are dead set against medicating their children even when there is plenty of evidence to indicate that the child may benefit from psychopharmacological intervention. On the other end, we have parents who are so fed up with their children’s behaviors and either don’t have the skills or the patience to enact behavioral interventions and thus want medication for their children immediately so that the parents can get some peace. Then, we have all the people in the middle: those who after trying behavioral interventions with their children for a period of time without achieving acceptable results finally decide that medication may be useful in helping the child overcome some of his or her difficulties, those who are willing to try medication while continuing to work diligently using behavioral interventions with their children to get the best possible results and those who maybe can’t be bothered to follow through with the behavioral interventions but for whose children medication provides some stabilizing effect.

Choosing to place children on medication for emotional or behavioral problems can be a scary thing for parents. We don’t know what side effects our child is going to experience, we don’t know if the medication is going to help or make things worse, we don’t know if the doctor we are consulting with has expertise or not, and the medical profession does not know the long term effects of early psychopharmacologic intervention, especially how these types of drugs affect developing brains. However, sometimes we have no choice. If our child is doing very poorly in the academic setting because he can’t pay attention or is too hyper to sit still, and a medication can remedy this problem, we are likely to try the medication because we know that our child’s education is extremely important to his or her long term success. If our child

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