(The explanation of "White 'Punks on Dope" will come in the second part of this post, along with a baby's arm holding an Apple, for no fee or waybill.) At 1:14 AM 7/11/96, snow wrote:

Tourettes was brought up to explain one small boys behavior towards his mother. He would (IIRC) call her a "fucking asshole", yet he didn't seem to have these sorts of problems around his father. True tourettes is not an emotional problem, it is _very_ rare, and the person with tourettes does not curse at only one person.

I of course never invoked "Tourette's Syndrome" as a likely reason for the kid's behavior. It is unlikely in the extreme, as I've seen the kid firsthand for several hours and he has never uttered a stereotypical Tourette's Syndrome sort of thing in my presence. The likely reason for his outburst is covered below.

Undisiplined brats do have emotional problems. Parents who are under the ignorant mis-apprehension that children do not need disipline are the cause of more than a few of this societies problems.

Indeed, this is almost certainly why he screamed obscenities at his mother. He did it because he _could_ do it, that is, because she refuses to punish him. And he gets a reward out of it, namely, attention. This is a pattern as old as humanity, of course. Mostly such temper tantrums and outbursts are held in check by the threat of sanctions by the parents, e.g., confinement (grounding), corporal punishment (beltings), denial of food (going to bed hungry), etc. Children above a certain age--maybe 4 or so--are quite aware of the consequences of their actions and the "game-theoretic" tradeoffs involved. Most reduce their frequency and magnitude of "acting out". This has worked well for millenia. In recent decades, do-gooders have taken upon themselves to intervene in the parenting process and have essentially succeeded in making such sanctions harder for parents to impose. Schools routinely teach young children to inform on their parents if they have been spanked, touched, talked to "inappropriately," etc. Check out the parent's rights newsgroups (and father's rights) for tales of interrogations by agents of Child Protective Services, who are empowered to remove a child immediately and without court proceedings if they merely _suspect_ a child has been treated in ways the State has deemed no longer appropriate. (I'm sure many of us agree that children should not have their jaws broken, should not be burned by cigarette butts as punishment, and should not be confined in closets for weeks at a time. The laws are well-intentioned. But as with many such well-intentioned laws, the "law of unintended consequences" has given Child Protective Services almost Gestapo-like powers to enter private homes, to intervene in custody disputes, and to assume guilt until innocence is proven.) So, what to do with children who are otherwise uncontrollable? Ah, the State has the answer. And its name begins with "R." 'Nuff said.

I will admit to the possibility of ADD being a "disease", but I think that the number of children who really have the disease is small compared to the number of childern recieving drugs for it.

This is the point I have been making. Not that ADD (aka ADHD, hyperactivity, etc.) does not sometimes exist, but that giving Ritalin and suchlike drugs to children has been a panacea for fidgeting, wandering attention, boredom, "cutting up" in class, class clowns, and so on. And perhaps worse, _parents_, such as the example I provided, are using it to control children. Where once they would've paddled the kid for using obscene language, or refusing to get dressed for school, now they pop a pill in the child's mouth.

15 years ago I would have been diagnoised as having ADD. I had trouble paying attention in class, I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I was a mild behavior problem. I didn't have ADD. I was simply bored by a system that either taught me stuff that was irrelevant (I thought so 15

I suspect this was true of 90% or more of us on this list...we're a bright lot, and it's hard to imagine that _any_ school could keep us from being bored a lot of the time. (And hard classes can be boring, too.)

Ok, so instead of arresting everyone who uses PGP as a child pornographer and throwing them in jail, we should arrest them, convict them (after all, they must be hiding something with that crypto) and then throw them in jail. Is that what you are saying?

Obviously any school child who refuses to open his backpack for the morning inspection has Privacy Fixation Syndrome. Any school child who refuses to discuss his thoughts about his or her budding sexuality with the school nurse has Privacy Fixation Syndrome. This Syndrome has become rampant in recent years, say psychiatrists and social workers. Some of these children are even using PGP to *encrypt* their files! This interferes with a wholesome and nurturing educational experience. Child Protective Services has begun to ask children if their parents are maintaining a proper environment at home. Use of PGP and other such tools of the paranoid crypto-militias is considered positive evidence of an unwholesome home environment. Fortunately, pediatric psychiatrists have discovered that Privacy Fixation Syndrome is treatable in the school environment with Prozac, Xanac, and Quaaludes. A moderate dose of these drugs appears to remove the compulsion to keep things secret, and assists in the child's ability to share his innermost thoughts with school nurses, teachers, and administrators. (Note to school administrators: A side benefit is that this lessening of "privacy anxiety" also makes investigation of the parental-units much easier. Prozac appears to be as effective as scopalaimine in extracting the details of home enviroments from children-units.) --Dr. Klaus von Ritalin, specializing in Privacy Fixation Syndrome