Cherie takes the drug "to help tame a severe anxiety disorder, the byproduct of strokes she suffered in the womb." And who among us would be so hard of heart as to deny treatment to our littlest apoplectics? A story in the next day's New York Times lays down a similar barrier to argument, quoting the director of the National Institute for Mental Health: If a kid is engaged in behaviors like "self-mutilation" or "head banging," explains Dr. Steven Hyman, "you should try medication."

Just one problem: There are more than a few self-mutilating, severely anxious survivors of womb trauma on the monkey bars out there. Children in North America received 800,000 new prescriptions for antidepressants alone in 1997, for example, and a February report in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that annual prescriptions for psychiatric drugs like Zoloft and Ritalin rose by fifty percent among preschoolers between 1991 and 1995. And then, too, reports the Times, "Researchers say 20 percent of white boys are taking (Ritalin) in some suburban school districts." Of course, twenty percent of white boys in suburban school districts have been known to bang their heads, but that was mostly back in the eighties, and it never damaged much more than their hair.

And the cocktails of uppers, downers, and SSRIs aren't the only realities of contemporary childhood that suggest the possibility that large numbers of grade-schoolers may someday sign with Colonel Tom, do a bunch of shitty movies, and die on the toilet. A study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation last November concluded that two-thirds of American children eight and over have their own television sets in the bedroom; ninety-five percent of the participating children above the age of seven told the foundation's researchers that they mostly watched TV alone, wherever the set happened to be. And they take an adult work week to do it, spending nearly forty hours a week consuming media product, the majority of it in television programming. So, yes: He always seems so listless and depressed - we may have to put him on Zoloft to help him succeed in kindergarten.

You can't really blame Lilly and other captains of chemistry for preparing to meet the market, though, and neither can you really be surprised by their efforts to create it. As industrial behavior, this is merely insightful. Toy manufacturers and Gannett newspapers aside, no one really sells to children for the sake of selling to children; Burger King gives away all of those free Squirtle action figures at least in part so that your toddler will one day pick up his or her freshman ten — to supplement his childhood fifty or sixty, judging by Critser's story — on Big Fish sandwiches and the Whopper Jr. with cheese. Everybody, or at least everybody who wants to make some money, does it, and it's not what you would call a big secret.

The campaign to convince parents that even dodgeball requires psychopharmacological intervention makes an even tidier bit of sense when considered as evolutionary behavior. Today's four-year-old pharmaceutical cocktailer is 2030's chemically engineered profit center, patched together with chains that fall apart if you take the pills away, exactly the sort of two-legged aphids on which our economic hive will feed.

Which is about as shocking as the conclusion that heavy petting leads to sex. Rigorously instructed in a lifestyle of social disconnection and persistent passivity, our most heavily medicated children suffer a poverty of intention, a deep lack of the learned ability to take ordinary action to fulfill the same healthy and unhealthy instincts that children have always felt, somewhere, in some undamaged core of thought. While this situation makes sense as a business proposition, we should note that there is also a more tribal, patriotic appeal. Depression may hurt you, but your whining hurts society as a whole, and whining parents tend to generate whining young. The age of digital commerce looks no more likely to reward inanition than did the age of mechanized warfare. By identifying our slow movers early, and shuffling them off to a happier place, we are merely clearing the way to prosperity for better citizens. Like the past, the future will belong not to the lotus-eating automatons but to the disgruntled overachievers — but if the dummies ever start to figure that out we'll have to double their dosages.