My son is getting Ritalin for his sixth birthday. You may think he'd prefer a new bike or some Legos (which he's also getting), but you'd be wrong.
What he wants more than anything is to feel good about himself, the choices he makes and the friends he has.
Unfortunately, I can't give him those things wrapped in a box, but I can give him the tools he needs to accomplish what he wants.
For almost six years, my husband and I have shown our son when to put down the metaphorical hammer and use the wrench instead. And while he is building better relationships than he was once able to, the results still lag far behind our blueprints.
Watching this intellectually precocious but socially stunted child struggle has taught us more than we ever wanted to know about how people learn.
Most of us respond to praise or punishment. Colter does not.
We have disciplined him for biting us, spitting on us, punching us; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We have praised him for exercising self-control; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We have bribed him and bargained with him. Finally, we asked for help.
We found a wonderful psychotherapist, talked with friends who are child psychologists and pored over every book on the subject of childhood behavioral disorders that we could find.
After years of frustration and much deliberation we decided (along with our son's therapist and his kindergarten teacher) that we had exhausted every option but medication.
My husband suggested we explain to our son that just like Daddy wears glasses to help him see better, medicine would help Colter see more clearly so he could stop and think about the choices he wanted to make.
When he heard that, Colter wanted to take the medicine. And we wanted it for him. But the psychiatrist we were referred to had other ideas. Despite what the media has called the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and the overuse of Ritalin, the psychiatrist was not persuaded that our son needed pharmaceutical help.
I was absolutely stunned and spent a long week feeling like a terrible mother for even suggesting that pills could possibly be a panacea for what ailed him. And then, I spoke again with the psychiatrist.
I listened more closely to what he was suggesting instead: "Let time pass."
Right or wrong, I can't allow my son's self-image to hang in the balance while some "impartial" professionals figure out what might be wrong with him. As his parent, I can't simply wait and see. Fortunately, Colter's psychologist agrees.
So, together, we fought for the Ritalin, and Colter's first few days on the drugs have shown a dramatic difference. Only time will tell whether we have truly been written a prescription for success.
This LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.