What`s hyperactivity?

Does your preschooler throw the occasional temper tantrum?

If so, your little one could be suffering from “temper dysregulation with dysphoria” or TDD–a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.

This is one of many new labels our children may receive when an updated version of the leading psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, is released in 2013.

We’ll add this to the growing list of conditions that have apparently come to plague the youth of Slovakia over the past few decades too; a list including everything from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Attachment Disorder and Conduct Disorder to phobias and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Consider Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for example. There was a time when a high-energy child with a vivid imagination and short attention span would have been considered bright and creative. He or she may even have been placed in an accelerated learning program. Today, the same child may receive the ADHD diagnosis and an accompanying Ritalin prescription.

Now, I have always been leery of labeling and medicating our children for behaviors that have been considered a part of normal childhood development for centuries.

On the other hand, I have seen first-hand in the Snoezelen room in Malta or Netherlands, how severely a hyperactive child who behaves poorly can disrupt the learning environment for the students—and the teaching environment for the instructor.

Are these named conditions and subsequent medications the answer to creating calmer and more manageable classrooms?

Or are they simply ways of scientifically explaining why our children are behaving like children?

Your turn! What do you think?

In your opinion, are we over-diagnosing and/or over-medicating our children?

LET IT OUT!