Christina Hoff Sommers: “The de-Tom Sawyering of American boys should not be on anyone’s agenda.”
By high school, one in five boys is now diagnosed with ADHD, a hard-hitting new column in Esquire reports. Writer Ryan D’Agostino notes that ADHD diagnoses have skyrocketed, afflicting 3 percent of American schoolchildren in 1997 and 11 percent in 2013.
This wave of diagnoses is clearly rife with error. D’Agostino points out that boys born in December are 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than boys born in January: boys born in December are typically the youngest in their class.
Read more at TLR: Doctor: You Don’t Have ADHD. No One Does. | The Libertarian Republic
Christina Hoff Sommers has argued that this overdiagnosis is based, in part, on the faulty assumption that we should expect identical results from boys and girls.
“It could be that as a society, we are pathologizing age-old male rambunctiousness,” says Sommers. “Some experts have suggested that ADHD would be significantly reduced if we allowed boys more unstructured recess and occasions for spirited rough-and-tumble play.”
1 comment