Critical Response to Casey Black’s “How to Solve Your Child’s ADHD Behavior”

This story is highly charged with opinion, clearly protesting our culture’s misguided inclination to over-medicate its children. It is in the imperative mode, the narrator addressing the reader as the parent. The narrator has a very matter-of-fact tone in directing the parent-reader to do ridiculous, insensitive things like: “turn the radio up loud enough to drown out any noise from the backseat.” This gives the piece a tone of acidic sarcasm, which has a nice effect when contrasted with such poignant moments as the parent being manipulated by the doctor, or the “flash forward” to the child’s suffering over the coming years. This combination makes the story angrily outspoken without its being preachy or heavy-handed.
Casey has a really nice way of weaving precise details and description in with the imperative narration, making the story very immediate and interesting. The reader is more inclined to visualize, to feel, what it is like to take the child to the doctor’s office because of the exact descriptions of action that are given: “keep a hand on him to prevent him from doing anything unpredictable such as banging his right hand against the office door labeled ‘Law Office of Sam Redding.’” The details are minute here, down to which hand the child slaps the door with; in no way are these details necessary to the plot, but they are necessary to the effect of the story, in that they make it intimate, place us in the situation. It is removed from the realm of a typical “visit to the doctor’s office story” by these specific, idiosyncratic details—rather than hear about the doctor’s white lab coat, a characterization we’ve heard and read a dozen times, we get the name of the lawyer who practices in the same office complex. Now, it is a “real,” unique story.
There are a couple of weak points in the story. (For a nitpick, there is one sentence where the second person voice is broken and becomes first: “if you are like me when I am nervous.” That one little clause completely pulls the reader out of the story during the tense climax, leaving them to wonder: “Who’s ‘I?’” Take it out!) One is when the doctor is painting the picture of horror for the parent, describing their child’s future as one of inevitable failure and even prison time. The sort of exaggerated manipulation by the doctor is good, but the parent’s reaction could be stronger, instead of just “calculating what the doctor’s words imply.” The narration puts me in the character of the parent: I want to know exactly what the doctor’s words make me see, in my mind’s eye. I would have liked a vivid description of picturing “my” child holding up a convenience store, or dealing drugs with his gang… something that really would send the supposed “shiver down my spine.”
The other weak point is the ending—the rest of the story is so strong, in that wonderful habit of description, in its sensitivity to the child and the sense of anger over the injustice—that the ending really needs to drive the thing home, and it doesn’t. We get the consequences of this terrible decision in only four sentences that read like a laundry list of side effects, and it’s not powerful enough. The ending could be expanded and vivid details picked out, to sort of linger in the terribleness of what this child has to go through in the coming years. Did the boy used to have a really great, infectious laugh that is never heard around the house anymore? Did he love to swim, but his gained weight makes him too lethargic to enjoy the water anymore? We really need to feel the pathos of what happens to this boy, so that it will extend the pathos of the parent’s guilty feelings and “good intentions.”
Other than that, it was good read—it is sad, funny, chilling, and makes quite the strong point about just how crazy it might be to medicate the “craziness” of our kids. Nice work!