View
Speed Trap
Robert Hart on Not Fixing Boys Who Aren’t Broken
He seemed a nice chap, friendly, outgoing, manly, donning a cowboy hat and speaking with a Tennessee accent. What had this fellow, a professional horse trainer, been doing in a hospital a few months earlier for attempted suicide? After the Shock Trauma Unit had saved his life, he spent some time in a psychiatric ward, but he was released without recommendation for follow-up.
Very strange indeed, as such cases always carry a recommendation for psychiatric care. Here was a mystery, someone simply not the type to be defeated by life. As he told me his story, not unlike others I had heard when I helped people apply for Medicare, I thought about another young man, our son David.
It was a steep climb up the hill in historic Ellicott City, Maryland. So I was grateful for the assistance given to my automobile. For, strapped safely in his car seat, I could hear my then two-year-old son, David Addison Hart, making the noise of an engine. Though he sounded more like an un-muffled motorcycle than a car, any help up the hill was appreciated.
And it was just the sort of help a little boy ought to give. His older sister helped too, I am sure, but in a more quiet and subtle manner. As I look at this son today, at the age of twenty, just entering his third year of college, and working hard without complaining, I am grateful that his mother and I had always understood his boyish nature to be the work of God. And I am grateful that we never took the bad advice of certain schoolteachers.
Just a Little Boy
Like a lot of little boys, he fidgeted a bit in his early years of school, being prone to look out of windows and to exhibit a touch of hyperactivity (as we used to call it). As early as first grade, he came home with a note from the teacher: “Have a doctor prescribe Ritalin for your son.”
I had enough trouble being obedient to teachers when I was younger, for which I received proper discipline. I certainly was not willing to obey now. Just who was this person to tell me to tell a doctor what to prescribe? And just what in heaven’s name was Ritalin?
Ritalin, as it turns out, is what we used to call Speed. Being a son of the baby-boom generation, born in the fifties and able to recall the sixties, I knew two things quite well: All narcotics are addictive and dangerous, and never— absolutely never—trust anyone from my generation who tells you that a narcotic is safe. I refused their advice when we were teenagers, and I know not to trust it now that we are graybeards. “Speed Kills” was the slogan we were given about street Ritalin back in our younger days. Indeed, it is a stimulant so powerful that it can damage the heart.
We went through this again in third grade with a teacher even more persistent. She would call me at home in the evenings and try to convince me to command a doctor to prescribe Ritalin. “He fidgets, and doesn’t always pay attention.” Finally I said, “Maybe you’re just a boring teacher. Have you ever thought of that?”
Not that I am without sympathy for the teachers. It must be very difficult to manage healthy children, especially little boys who do not know how to sit quietly for hours on end like little girls. Little girls do much better than little boys in the elementary schools. They are not caught up in imaginary battles with bad guys, or busy imitating large trucks at high speeds, or airplanes in flight.
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.1—January/February 2020
on a Saint's Charism That Cures Toxic Perfectionism by Colleen Carroll Campbell
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
