Not ill — just naughty

Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you can still hold a conversation without being constantly interrupted by puerile screeching, crying, charging and table-thumping. And whenever I reach the Channel Tunnel terminal at Calais on the return leg of a trip to France, I know from the din of temper tantrums that I am once more approaching the land of the spoilt brat.

Yet, according to influential psychiatric opinion, the badly behaved child here deserves our sympathy rather than our condemnation. For the seven-year-old boy yelling his head off or kicking other children is actually suffering from a worrying medical condition, known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. It is ADHD that causes him to hurl chairs at his teacher and abuse at strangers. It is ADHD that leads him into fights, crime and drug abuse. His lack of self-control is nothing more than a desperate cry for help in the midst of his illness.

Tragically, a large swath of Britain’s youth now appears to be in the grip of ADHD, with an estimated 6 to 8 per cent of our children suffering from this distressing ailment. Psychiatrists have long been aware of the problems of the ill-disciplined, overactive child; as long ago as 1865 the German physician Heinrich Hoffman wrote of a boy he called ‘fidgety Philip’ who ‘won’t sit still, wriggles, giggles, swings backwards and forwards, tilts up his chair’ and would probably grow up to be ‘rude and wild’. But it was only in 1987 that the label of Attention Deficit Disorder — later lengthened to include hyperactivity — was officially attached to such behaviour.