It seems that almost every day, I come across someone, in a blog, in a news report, in an overheard conversation in the grocery store, who thinks that kids on ADHD meds are the embodiment of everything wrong with America. The parents are lazy. The schools are lazy. The teachers are lazy. The kids eat too much sugar. The kids watch too much TV. It's all due to video games. If only the mothers breastfed longer. The parents don't give enough discipline. It's all due to food coloring. Kids spend too much time in daycare. If only the class sizes were smaller. If they'd only give up dairy/gluten/junk food/ingredient-of-the-week, they could just fix this. And, my favorite, it's all a scam from Big Pharma to sell drugs.

My son is 12. My son has ADHD. He was diagnosed at age 6. And yes, he's been taking medications since that time.

(I heard that gasp. I must be one of those parents.)

Come along with me. Walk a mile in my shoes. Welcome to armchair parenting at its best.

We knew all the way back in preschool that he was not like the other kids. This was half-day preschool, and he was home the other half of the day with a parent and his sister, and very little TV. In a room of fifteen three-year-olds, he's the one who can't sit still. He's the one who doesn't know how to make friends. He body-slammed his best friend on the playground because he didn't know it would hurt. We knew he was smart, he had an incredible vocabulary, but couldn't, wouldn't sit still. Ever.

OK. He's only three. Then four. Then five. It starts to hurt, after a while, when we knew that our kid was the weird one, the outlier, the one off the edge of the bell curve. Whatever it was they expected kids of his age to do, in any way academically, he didn't. By contrast, he could talk a blue streak. He remembered everything from documentaries on dinosaurs. He could explain the life cycle of a nudibranch. He could ride a razor scooter, a bike, and a skateboard. But at age five, when kids were expected to start writing on that three-lined paper, fuggeddaboudit. He climbed the walls.

When his public school kindergarten teacher mentioned ADHD in the first week, I panicked. We pulled him out, put him in a private, full-day kindergarten, with fifteen kids and a teacher and an aide... about the best situation we could afford. He floundered. We pursued ADHD testing on our own, with our own physician. Conner's Behavioral Index, if you've never seen it, is a detailed questionnaire for parents, teachers, and caregivers to fill out. He had every indicator in the book.

We agonized. What were we thinking? Medication for a six-year-old? But how long do we wait? Until he's missed all of kindergarten? All of first grade? All of second grade? We went to a parents class that our pediatrics office offered. And there we heard the heartbreaking stories from the parents with kids in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades, middle school, high school. The kids thought they were stupid. They thought they were losers. Many had repeated grades. They had no friends. They didn't know how to slow down enough to read social cues from other kids. They were miles behind in school. So they acted out. Got sent to the principal's office. Hated everything and everyone. We saw more than one parent cry in that class, telling their stories. One dad said, "It must be like going to work every day for your whole life when your boss and everyone there hates you."

We decided to try. Ritalin, the most common medication, is a lot like caffeine. It's in and out. And it has 40+ years of data about its use. If it didn't work, we'd stop.

The effect, once we got the dosage right, was remarkable. This kid, who'd always had a built-in motor and a mouth that never stopped, went quiet one afternoon. I went up to his room, and there he was on his floor, with an entire city built out of blocks, books, and Matchbox cars. He was so excited to tell me all about it. I watched, stunned, while he explained. "This is a ferry boat over here, mom, and the cars are going across this river. Then they get out, and they go over there..."

He had never, ever had the patience to build anything that detailed before. He was happy in his imaginary world, and productive in his six-year-old way.

But that's not the end. Not by a long shot. The medicines are a moving target. For some kids, they stay on the same medicine for years. Not mine. As he grew, the dosages went up. We tried other meds with no luck at all. His patient and fantastic teachers gritted their teeth through every trial, gave us daily reports of his wall-climbing at school, and cheered with us when we got it right again. We fought the side effects--the sleeplessness, the lack of appetite.

And he made some progress in school. Some. For years, I've been a part-time homeschooler, doing every blessed project at home with him that ought to be done in school (but guess who didn't get it done when all the other kids did). I still do. I rock at "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" because I live it.

In third grade, after two and a half frustrating years getting extra help from the school resource room, we took him to a private clinic for more testing. In addition to ADHD, he has dyslexia and dysgraphia, and an IQ of 140. He's smart as a whip. But the part of his brain that deals with written symbols is completely miswired.

These are common comorbid disorders with ADHD. Textbook, in fact. So now we have a tutor who comes to our house three days a week, to give him what the public school is too underfunded to. And we did a year of weekly lessons with an occupational therapist to help with handwriting. It helped a little. Not much.

He's 12 now, and in middle school. It's been a hellish year. He went from fifth grade, where he'd finally come into his own with friends and a great teacher, to a new school, new teachers, new friends. To say he doesn't do transitions well would be an understatement. He feels singled out and weird at school, which is the kiss of death socially. He uses a portable keyboard. He goes to the resource room. He has an aide that helps in some classes, and the kids pick on him. "Who's that, your grandma?" they ask. I contact every teacher once a week, and I help him keep track of assignments. I still feel like a homeschooler, now that the expectations of middle school are higher. Every weekend is filled with catch-up work that he didn't get done in class. He has extremely limited video game time, and he earns extra time, in five-minute increments, for all the behaviors we're trying to encourage--writing down assignments, turning them in, keeping track of possessions. I could get my very own CPA in video game scheduling.

We continue to search for the right combination of medications. The pediatrician recently ran out of ideas and referred us to a specialist. We hope things will get better. The medications are sort of effective. Kind of. Certainly better than nothing. But not a magic bullet. They don't fix dyslexia. They don't make the other kids be nice to him.

There's the ADHD secret handshake that other parents have--when we start swapping war stories, doctor's names, things we've tried. I have never, ever, in six years of this, met anyone who gave their kid medication lightly.

We've gone to behavior therapy, for him and the whole family. It helps. A little. He does all kinds of sports. He gets lots of exercise.  We don't eat a diet loaded with crap. There are none of the landmines in our family that tend to cause behavior problems in kids--divorce, moves, deaths, etc. We're happily married, we're in the same house we've been in since he was born.

When I read about the diet-of-the-week cure for ADHD, I want to know where the outcomes research is. "My kid got better" is not data. Several hundred kids with a control group and a double-blind study is data, and there's very little data to show that diet has a thing to do with it. I wish it did. If it did, then medical clinics would be having ADHD diet classes, just like they have diabetes cooking classes, or classes for people with celiac disease, or weight loss classes. Show me the Mayo Clinic ADHD Diet class, and I'll be all over it.

If my son needed glasses, insulin, allergy shots, crutches, or orthopedic shoes, of course I'd do it. I'd never question it. But psychiatric medications? For a child? There must be something wrong with those parents.

The truth is, my husband and I are busting our butts for our son. He's working harder and longer than any other sixth grader I know. And yes, he takes ADHD medications.