InAcademic Doping? Gimme a Break, she writes:

I saw this story blogged yesterday on a university newspaper site and passed it by. Why? Because it’s NON-NEWS.

The NEWS is that these parents are obsessed with their children’s academic performance to the extent that they are appealing to their children’s pediatrician for help boosting it.

The NEWS is that the dynamic in play here sets up their non-ADHD kid for a sense of failure where none need exist.

[snip]

The NEWS is that by framing the issue in this light, the writer (Victoria Clayton) minimizes legitimate use of Ritalin for ADHD kids, further demonizes the prescription of stimulant medications, and shifts the focus from the REAL issues to non-issues which are NOT NEWSWORTHY.”

As for me, the following quote is key:

“Perrin, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other physicians say this is an increasingly common scenario in doctors’ offices around the country, though there are no hard statistics on it.“

I am reminded of Jay Matthew’s opinion piece, Too Few Overachievers

“I have spent a great deal of time interviewing students and parents in the 20817 Zip code, where Whitman is located, and similar neighborhoods such as 10583 (Scarsdale, N.Y.), 60093 (Winnetka, Ill.) and 91108 (San Marino, Calif.) News editors and book publishers are susceptible to Robbins’s argument because many of them live in such places, where family incomes are in the top 5 percent nationally and talk about school stress in rampant. It would be almost a relief to many educators if these families, and their highly motivated students, were typical and overachievement were the greatest threat to high school education today. But the sad truth is quite the opposite.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national achievement test, reading and math scores for 17-year-olds have been stagnant the last 30 years. One of the reasons for this, many educators say, is that students, educators and parents have bought into the notion popularized by Robbins and other social critics that American teenagers have too much schoolwork and should be allowed instead to read for pleasure and watch the sunset and think deep thoughts.

But how, exactly, are they using their time? Robbins is quite right about Whitman. Its students are frequently taking five or six AP courses and putting in four hours a night or more on schoolwork. What Robbins and the parents and students in such communities fail to see, however, is that they are in the uppermost 5 percent in homework, just as they are in housing square footage, money spent on vacations and stock market investments. Only about 10 percent of American high school students have Ivy League ambitions. For the vast majority, academic stress is pretty rare.“

I am sure there are a handful of toxic parents looking to give their kid an extra edge.

But I don’t think it is a giant national issue.