Free Autopilot by Andrew Smart Page B

eating massively processed food, and playing video games in order to virtually explore their worlds, become fat and depressed.
    There are hundreds of books and magazine articles on time management for children with titles like Organization; Time Management & Study Skills for Children ; Late, Lost and Unprepared: A Parents’ Guide to Helping Children with Executive Functioning, and Get That Kid Organized!
    For those achievement-obsessed parents and students for whom unnecessary pharmacological manipulation with amphetamine-derived ADHD medication is not financially or morally problematic, there are apparently plenty of academic-doping doctors who will prescribe ADHD medicine to undiagnosed students so they can attain artificial laser-like focus and crush their competition on the SATs.
    These doctors are no different ethically from the shady underworld-doping doctors one finds in professional sports. And I would argue it is the same “win-at-all-costs” culture that breeds the desire to use any means necessary to attain what are essentially meaningless test results.
    Forcing a child to become a pharmaceutically-enhanced and hyper-organized mini-adult at an early age removes the child’s sense of control over her world. Depression and anxiety are highly correlated with people’s sense of control over their own lives.
    Psychologists have long used a questionnaire to assess the degree to which people feel control over their lives called the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. If you score toward the internal end of the scale you feel that you are source of control over your life, and if you score toward the external end of the scale you feel that your life is controlled by someone or something other than you.
    Several studies have shown that the more toward the internal end of the scale you are, the less likely you are to become depressed and anxious. When researchers analyzed data from the Rotter scale over a forty-two year period from 1960 to 2002, they found that scores have shifted from the internal end of the scale to the external. These scores had shifted so much that an average young person in 2002 was more external (felt that external forces controlled her life) than eighty percent of young people in the 1960s.
    In 2010, Newsweek magazine ran a story devoted to what it called “The Creativity Crisis,” which received moderate attention. Newsweek reported that scores on psychological tests that are designed to assess a child’s creativity have been steadily declining since 1990.
    This, despite the fact that IQs have been rising. After analyzing the data from around three hundred thousand children and adults, Kyng Hee Kim, a researcher at William & Mary, found that this decline in creativity is most pronounced in exactly the age group from which you’d expect the most creativity, kindergarten through sixth grade. As children become more scheduled, more measured, more managed to achieve, and more hijacked by digital media, they become less and less creative.
    Rilke described entering school as entering captivity. Modern parents have become preoccupied with developmental activities that supposedly enhance their children’s chances of success even before school begins, success as defined by grades, future salaries, and awards.
    In Rilke’s poem “Imaginary Biography,” he describes the horror of starting school, which for me involved sobbing as my mother left me standing in the line of other seemingly happy kids at the kindergarten door:
    First childhood, no limits, no renunciations, no goals.
    Such unthinking joy.
    Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries, captivity, and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.
    Ironically for a culture obsessed with optimizing child development, increasing evidence about the brain shows that not having externally directed goals is crucial for the brain’s development.
    Through the constant external demands and activities