Then there is the specter of a Brave New World in which children are subjected to "cosmetic psychopharmacology," for no other reason than to simply "narrow the gap between I.Q. and performance." These parents want to give their children an edge and are willing to give the kids drugs so they get higher scores on their spelling tests.

I'm one of those people who hates the idea of giving children drugs -- for any reason. I don't even like antibiotics; my pediatrician practices homeopathy. And I, too, am horrified by the indisputable facts: There has been a 700 percent increase in prescriptions of Ritalin in the last nine years; Americans consume 90 percent of all the Ritalin in the world; the Office of Drug Enforcement "estimates that by the year 2000, fully 15 percent of school-age children will be taking Ritalin for something."

But for what? one writer asked recently, "brattiness, boredom, reluctance, defiance? Whose attention is truly deficient -- kids' or parents' (or both?)?"

That's what it all seems to boil down to: ADHD is some sort of bogus malady and the only thing wrong with these obnoxious children is their parents. And now I am one of those parents.

How did I arrive at this door? Kicking and screaming.

I knew my son was extraordinary early on in his life. There was the time when he stood up in his high chair and flexed all of his muscles like an iron man. He was 5 months old. He looked like he was having a seizure of some sort and was about to burst, he had so much pent-up energy. My partner, Lisa, and I filmed him, he looked so strange.

At 6 months he scuttled side to side like a crab in his crib, then at 10 months, he walked across my grandmother's kitchen floor. After those first tentative steps, he ran everywhere and if he fell down, he'd pop right up like one of those inflatable boxing clowns. I bought him a toy motorcycle and trotted after him as he zoomed up and down our street, Fred Flintstone-style, a hundred times a day. He wore shoes out in weeks, dragging the toes on the pavement to stop himself.

Inside, despite massive childproofing efforts, he got into everything. Once he poured a gallon of olive oil onto the kitchen floor while I was washing dishes not more than three feet away from him. In what seemed like split seconds he climbed the bookshelves, knocked lamps over, poured bleach on the carpet. I couldn't blink my eyes, it seemed, without him getting into something.

Then there was that other side to him. I knew he was a wild man -- I couldn't take my eyes off of him for 30 seconds -- but he also had a soft, pensive side. Once while he was taking a nap, I stepped outside to water the plants. I looked through the window at him. He was lying in his crib, playing with his feet, looking around the room. He stayed like this for a long time, musing, content to be by himself.

When he was older, a walk down the block to the playground would take over an hour. Zachary looked at everything; he'd lie belly down on the gray sidewalk to get a better look at a line of ants. I loved walking with him because he slowed me down, made me notice the squirrels' teeth marks on the acorns.

He was such a sensual child. He had a make-up kit and he'd rub his cheek with the soft brush until he fell asleep. A tube of Chap Stick could send him into ecstasy; he rubbed it around and around on his lips until he was glassy-eyed. This paradox was what kept me from believing my son had ADHD years later.

Then he went to school, a retro-hippie-run day care, called the Cooperative Early School. Zachary achieved notoriety there for figuring out how to unlock the childproof lock on the gate. Indoors he was a hellion. One of his teachers there, a normally blissed-out woman, remembered Zachary years later as "the kid who ruined my classroom." He was 3 years old at the time.

Lisa and I pulled him out of that school after the counselors got so angry with him for pooping on the playground for the third time that they put him in time-out for nearly two hours. Never mind that he was pretending to be an armadillo and that he pooped behind a shed. Clearly, his inability to listen had stretched their limits.