Children need ‘Rat play’
From Dr Sean Haldane
Sir: I agree with Leo McKinstry that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a ‘scandal’, but he only goes halfway to why in stating it is just ‘naughtiness’ (‘Not ill just naughty’, 26 February). ADHD is linked to the suppression of rough-andtumble play, otherwise known as ‘Rat play’ — appropriately, as experiments with the young of rats as well as other animals show that they need it to grow up neurologically healthy and to develop the capacity to learn. Children need it too.
The American researcher Jaak Panksepp, in a chapter on Rat play in his Affective Neuroscience (OUP, 1998), describes an innate ‘play system’ in the brain. Boys and girls both have it, but boys’ play is naturally rougher — which schoolteachers don’t like. Many more boys are diagnosed with ADHD than girls. Panksepp notes ‘the widespread pathologisation of rough-andtumble play in the American school system’.
The same thing is now happening here: children are becoming hyper and can’t sit still in class because they are not allowed to run in the playground. They are being drugged into the compulsory niceness which is part of our society’s project to become politically correct and risk-free.
Sean Haldane London E12
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