When my generation was passing through early childhood and entering the first grade, when we were six years old, none of us or anyone we ever heard of in our community was afflicted with ADHD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Likewise, my two children also grew through early childhood without evidence of any children within their knowledge being stricken with this condition, which allegedly now afflicts 6.5 million American children, or 10.5 percent, one in 9!
- 2.3 percent of young children ages 3-5
- 11.1 percent of school-age children ages 6-11
- 13.6 percent of adolescents ages 12-17
Although this child’s malady was first identified in medical journals as early as 1775, its defining characteristics have been refined over the years to include “children who had serious problems with sustained attention and self-regulation, who were often aggressive, defiant, resistant to discipline, excessively emotional or passionate, which showed little inhibitory volition, and could not learn from the consequences of their actions”.
A wide variety of pharmaceutical medications are prescribed to children to treat the ADHD symptoms of inattention, moodiness, anxiety, hyperactivity, aggression, defiance, and sleep disorders. When a child has multiple ADHD symptoms, more than one drug at a time may be prescribed to the child. If the various symptoms progress from one symptom to the next, the drug for each symptom may be prescribed progressively.
The information herein originated from a recent November 19, 2025, Wall Street Journal news report entitled “Millions of Kids Are on ADHD Pills. For Many, It’s the Start of a Drug Cascade.” The data was based on an analysis of Medicaid data from 166,000 children from 3 to 14 years of age, taken from 2019 through 2023, who were prescribed a medication for ADHD.
In our experience, why didn’t our family see them back then – or even hear about them? Our grade school classes averaged about thirty children per class, and with six grades, 200 to 300 students attended each post-World War II American grade school. Compared to current times, we should have had 20 to 30 ADHD students in our grade schools. These were neighborhood schools where the mothers knew each other, but this adverse health phenomenon obviously did not regularly occur in previous eras.
Autism is another disease that has apparently also run rampant among our youth. Any parent with young children who are about to begin their journey into adulthood in this complex society should use their common sense when confronted with issues like those described above. What has changed within our society to cause these pandemics to develop so aggressively?
Unless medically proven otherwise, children born today have no common background factors that would cause over 10 percent of them to have ADHD than those born 50 years ago. If this is the case, then ADHD is being over-diagnosed, perhaps for the benefit of the day-care provider, teacher, or physician. Many, if not most, young children thrive in their early years in an unstructured environment than in daycare supervision or a pre-kindergarten classroom. Early kindergarten is a modern construct to accommodate working mothers and additional members of today’s teacher unions.
In bygone years, nonworking mothers provided early opportunities for their children to develop at their own pace, discovering new things in the world around them. Mothers were there to monitor their moods, encourage their independent investigations of the world around them, allow them to mingle with siblings and neighborhood children, and provide constant loving care.
Based on the report of the WSJ writers, medical professionals do not know what permanent effects most various drugs have on developing young minds, prescribed either separately or in combination with the myriad medications being prescribed for ADHD. The Journal article previewed a litany of cases where children never outgrew their dependence on drugs and the tragic outcomes in their lives, a possible contributing factor in the new generational use of hard drugs nationwide.
Although it is not politically correct, some brave researchers should investigate the correlation between early medication use and gender dysphoria and/or those young men involved in the rash of unexplained shootings during the last decade.
We have got Trouble in River City – and no one seems to care!
TW3
December 4, 2025
John Whitmore Jenkins
