This isn t just of interest to academic neuropsychologists. This would clearly be fatal to any child s development, as anyone familiar with how brains or children actually function will plainly see. If we followed the advice implied by this version of brain development, we would be trying to teach children at exactly the time in their lives when their brains are not yet ready to learn and then stop teaching them at precisely the time that their brains do become ready. Bruer tells us that public policy is in fact heading in this direction. Reclaiming Our Children .
Biological psychiatry says all the traits that children display are determined by brain activity.
It is trivially true that all of a person s thoughts, emotions, and behavior are a product of what is going on in the brain. But when people begin to see every inconvenient behavior as a disorder, and when they then propose, on the basis of the so-called new brain science, that we fix the child by fixing his brain, we have got a problem. Breggin targets this recent tendency on the part of educators, psychiatrists, and policy makers to view children s behaviors as dysfunctions when they depart from the norm and then to advocate medical treatments for those supposed dysfunctions. Biological psychiatry poses threats to children for a number of reasons, all detailed effectively in the first two chapters of Reclaiming Our Children . If parents are convinced that the source of a child s problems is brain chemistry gone wrong, then they will also become convinced that there is nothing that they can do to change the child s circumstances beyond taking him to a doctor to be medicated.