Linda M. Blum - Raising Generation RX (Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality)

In the kid world, too nice equals way nerdy; in the grown-up world, too naughty translates to, well, Ritalin. Below are the holiday seasons best ways to keep pint-size characters stylish and happy, whether theyre strolling the primrose path, walking on the wild sideor caroming back and forth.

Ellen Tien, Dont Make Santa Guess, Dress the Part, Sunday Styles, New York Times, November 25, 2007

The breakfast buffet at Camp Echo starts at a picnic table covered in gingham-patterned oil cloth. Here, children jostle for their morning medications: Zoloft for depression, Abilify for bipolar disorder... and a host of medications for attention deficit disorder.... The dispensing of pills and pancakes is over in minutes, all part of a typical day at a typical sleep-away camp in the Catskills.

Jane Gross, Checklist for Camp: Bug Spray. Sunscreen. Pills, New York Times, July 16, 2006

Every book has a moment of conception, even if the period of gestation, as in this case, is a very long one. This book began as a tiny embryonic idea in 1996 when, like so many mothers of children struggling to navigate their social worlds and perhaps caroming between naughty and nice, I scurried to pick up my second-grade son from the after-school program at our quiet suburban elementary school. Once home, he hesitated, but then burst out with his half-secret question, as if hed learned some new swear word on the playground: Mom? Sean was going, Your mother has ADD. Your mother has ADD. Do you have it? What is it?

Wow: your mother has ADD. My colleagues at work thought this was simply hilarious, the new yo mama of the nice white burbs. My own your mother has ADD seemed to displace stigmatized difference from a boys body to a mothers brain. This thought was, of course, troubling personally, but what did it signal about our culture if seven year-old boys hurled such labels for invisible brain imbalances and hard-wiring flaws at mothers and sons?

This book begins from the several very clearest factors signaled: the growing prevalence of diagnoses like ADD among U.S. kids, the growing cultural preoccupation with such invisible disabilities and the medications used to treat them, and the pressures and stigma mothers face in dealing with these new diagnoses and treatments. But there are also several larger factors, just behind the scenes, I believe are signaled which figure importantly in this book. First, this is a book about persistence and change in twenty-first-century U.S. families and gender arrangements. Such arrangements have been changed by the wholesale entry of mothers into the labor force and, as I will come to below, the declining opportunities for mens breadwinning. Yet this is, nonetheless, a book about how we persist in assigning mothers primary responsibility for children and the major share of blame when things go wrong. Second, this is also a book about the New Economy and the postindustrial workers it now requires, with sharp divides between its winners and losers. And third, this book is about the neoliberal ideology or belief system which undergirds this high-stakes New Economy, a belief system valuing individual over public responsibility or government protection, beliefs that have created a more challenging context for family life and childrearing in the United States today. In the chapters to follow, I continue to unravel the influence of these three interrelated social factors while moving squarely to the major project of this book: examining how mothers differently situated in this reconfigured social world navigate its institutional arenas on behalf of vulnerable children, taking personal responsibility for their entrance into a yet more perilous future.