The Developmental Issues on Children in the Foster Care System The foster care system is the system where children go when their parents are unable to take care of them. In the foster care system, children are placed by trained professionals who are licensed adults that provide substitute parental care when the parents are away. Research states that the number of children in the foster care system was 513,000, a decline of about 10% from 2000 (Bigner, 2011). Children that are placed in foster care have suspiciously high rates of physical, developmental, and mental health problems and often have many unmet medical and mental health care needs. A greater number of young children with complicated, serious physical health, mental health, or developmental problems are entering foster care during the early years when brain growth is most active.
Rare or “orphan” diseases are now affecting close to 200,000 people in the United States. This group is made up of nearly 6,000 disorders, and one of them is called Angelman Syndrome. A distant cousin to Angelman Syndrome is called Autism, and this disorder is spreading rapidly affecting families every day with 1 child in every 166 births being diagnosed with Autistism. Doctors in the United States will diagnose 50 new cases every day. While both of these disorders fall under the label of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), and are considered being in the same family they are actually very far apart.
On its ninth National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, the DEA collected 309 tons of unwanted prescription drugs at 5,495 sites throughout the country. This brought the total amount of drugs collected in four years to 2,411 tons.3 The Medicine Abuse Project is a five-year action campaign that aims to prevent half a million teens from abusing medicine by the year 2017. The campaign provides comprehensive resources for parents and caregivers, law enforcement officials, health care providers, educators and others so that everyone can take a stand and help end medicine abuse. You can take the pledge on their website and be one of nearly 10,000 advocates who have already committed to fighting this epidemic.5 Another effort to promote awareness and prevention is PEERx. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) developed PEERX, an online educational campaign, to discourage abuse of prescription drugs among teens.
According to the National Institute of health, ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder in children, affecting an estimated 3 to 5 percent of school-aged children (Castillo, 2013). A new study conducted by Kaiser Permanente reveals an increase in the number of children diagnosed with ADHD between 2001 and 2010. The new statistics, based on electronic health records of 850,000 children, show that nearly 4.9 percent of children between the ages of five and eleven were diagnosed with ADHD at Kaiser Permamente Southern California branches between 2001 and 2010. Earlier studies, presented in Figure 7, indicate that 9.9 percent of children between the ages of four and seventeen were diagnosed with ADHD, and 4.6 percent were taking medication (“State-based,” 2012). The 2007 study was based on 91,642 interviews conducted using a random-digit dialed landline telephone survey, and ADHD status was based on parental report.
Anyone who has ever taken it, which I can bet for certain is well over half of the class knows even your favorite meal doesn’t sound or look all too appealing when you’ve got psychostimulants pumping through your brain and your blood. Pharmaceutical research has become so advanced and such a wealthy industry that there needs to be a change in the way this country handles cases of ADD and ADHD. The first change must be to the chemical structure of the drug itself. If people were more educated about what adderall really is, the category of drugs it is classified into, and how severe its side effects could be, I think parents would be a little less willing to put their kid on this drug. While parents want to see their children succeed, I’d rather my child be healthy and free of mind and body altering substances given to them by of all people, a doctor – someone who should be promoting health, not worrying about the percentage of money he’ll get once you take that prescription to the pharmacy.
Mandell et al. (2006) examined the disparities in the diagnosis of children with autism using insurance claims of 406 Medicaid-eligible children, including 242 African-American, 118 Caucasian, 33 Latino, and 13 children falling into other categories. They found that African-American children were three times more likely than Caucasian children to receive another diagnosis first and were 2.6 times less likely than Caucasian children to receive an autism diagnosis on their first specialty care visit (Mandell et al., 2006). Once African-American children entered treatment, they required three times the number of visits over a period three times as long as Caucasian children before receiving an autistic disorder diagnosis (Mandell et al., 2006). African-American children were also 5.1 times more likely than Caucasian children to receive a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder than of ADHD, and 2.4 times more likely to receive a diagnosis of
On average today Americans are prescribed 3.5 billion prescriptions annually. This number has been steadily increasing in recent years. Also today just about half of all Americans take one or more prescription drugs daily (About.com). These numbers are alarming and need to be changed to prevent America from becoming a society that is completely medicated, just like the society in A Brave New World. To prevent a “Prozac-Nation”, prescriptions for anti-depressants, and medicines that alter the mood of a person should be carefully regulated.
1940- Symptoms of ADHD continue to be blamed on ‘’minimal brain damage’’. 2003- FDA approves Strattera, the first non- stimulant drug for ADHD, and the first to be approved for use in adults. 2003- The CDC reports that approximately 4.4 million children- about 8 percent of all U. S. Children aged 4 to 17- have been diagnosed with ADHD and 2.5 million of them are taking medication for this disorder. ( Everyday Health, 2010) ‘’Today we know that younger children are more likely to show hyperactivity ADHD symptoms and older children or adults are more likely to have symptoms of inattention. ( Hunter, Scott J., University of Chicago, 2010).
According to Chasity Goddard, most of the time there is a reason “55 percent of patients experiencing recurrent miscarriages have an underlying blood clotting disorder as the cause. The good news is that this report also states that "more than 98 percent will have a normal term delivery with preconception aspirin”. During the change of birth control, I got pregnant with my son and it terrified me. But, I decided to take low dose baby aspirin everyday and I was doing well. I was around 3 months pregnant when I had skipped a couple days of aspirin due to money difficulties.
My family disagreed. My family thought that kids should be allowed to be kids. The result was me getting kicked out of the school that I was attending. When are teachers and doctors going to realize that kids don’t need these drugs? I think too many doctors are prescribing drugs to children who don’t necessarily need these prescriptions.