Something really freaky happened yesterday.

My 3-yr-old daughter was stuffed up for the past 5 days with no other symptoms.  None of us have allergies but I took her to the doc anyway as this was affecting her sleep.  And mine.

She was prescribed children’s Zyrtec, as a try-this-and-see-if-it-works measure.  I gave her a preemptive dose when we left the doc to see if it would help enough for my not-breathing-sleep-deprived child to take a nap and finally get the rest she needed.

An hour later, she lost her mind.

Before I go any further know this isn’t a rail against medications or a frantic black & white parental warning message– medications can significantly benefit us when they’re used appropriately.  I’m also aware not all medications affect people the same; there were plenty of posts out there where this med hadn’t affected their kids at all.

And there were plenty of the opposite nature, which we found when I started to realize the crazy toddler in front of me might not be in full control of what was happening to her and turned to cyberspace for a general opinion.

She couldn’t calm down.  She couldn’t relax.  It was like her brain was blitzed– standing there on her bed screaming and yelling, and just flat out losing it.  While this may be dismissed as typical toddler behavior for some, we all know our own kiddos best and for her this was so far outside the box we may as well have been riding Pegasus to Mt. Olympus.  I had no idea she was even capable of that type of craziness.

We resolved the nasty downward-spiraling conflict in a way that I still came out on top as the parent but she still saved face, and afterwards watched a movie to put us in as small of a confrontational window as possible until the meds wore off.

And then she was fine.  Tired, but herself.

While the experience freaked me out, it did get me thinking about how much small things, like what our little people eat and “common” meds they take, can drastically affect their behavior.  My daughter was a great test bed in this situation, albeit a sample size of one, as she rarely eats processed foods and we make all of our pantry stuff (stocks, breads, etc.) from scratch.

Don’t internalize.  I’m not inferring anything bad about anyone’s food decisions or putting us on a pedestal, trust me; in reality, and behind the frilly bullshit healthy kids eating blogs you see out there, it’s a lot of work that takes an incredible amount of time if you’re not fully vested in the time vs. benefit part of it.  However in this situation it helped because it gave me a baseline, and I could very quickly scientific method what was going on with the addition of the new med.

She is of course a typical 3-yr-old.  With the testing.  And the ever present need to step right up to the line, and sometimes over, to see if the same consequence occurs (that’s all her father btw, I’m a very docile creature).  However I’ve always thought we just got lucky as far as her temperament even though we try to be as consistent as we can in this guessing game of parenthood.  So the shock of seeing a completely different person suddenly emerge– aggressive, possessive, tantrumatic, felt like someone had slapped me sideways.

And it got me thinking more, because I’ve seen similar behavior in other kids– that blitzed out reaction mode where it *almost* looked like they couldn’t calm down if they wanted to.

Behavior that was always attested to age, and I just assumed since I’d never seen it in my child it must be because of unengaged parenting and too much screen time.

Not to say these aren’t symptoms, and I see the irony here because we ended up watching a movie yesterday to help diffuse the situation, but is some of the disengaged parenting these days actually a result of certain kiddo behaviors and not the cause like I assumed?

That kind of flips it all on it’s head, doesn’t it?

Is the poor behavior chain of events starting with crap food and then overmedication, and resulting in parents offering screen time and partaking in other disengaging techniques to diffuse the resulting behavior?

And here is where the food part of this really comes to light, because in America our children have a very poor diet; both in most homes and at restaurants.  There is no way the constant influx of sugar and processed foods from powder mixes and boxes, fruit snacks, sodas, juice boxes, thousands and thousands of different color goldfish and breakfast cereals, aren’t affecting our little people’s behavior.

Just because it’s labeled organic doesn’t make it real, and most food from restaurants isn’t real either these days.  Naked truth.

So take a kid who’s already not eating the best diet, which is probably causing slight behavioral problems from sugar highs/crashes and lack of nutrients.  True, the behavior may not be easy to differentiate from typical toddler (or hey, teenager) growing and testing behavior– but then add something else on top of it, like a widely known and “accepted” allergy medication.  When does the straw break the camel’s back?

At what point is the kiddo being affecting by all these little behavior-changing inputs so much that they’re acting like, without choice, a whole different person?  A very different person than the one you’re trying to raise, and the inputs you’re putting in?

And what are they learning by our reactions to this behavior?  Because I can tell you when my kid lost her mind yesterday and I started to realize we needed as little interaction as possible to get through it without an irrevocable verbal event occurring between us, the first solution I had was screen time in the form of a movie.

I was actually looking for a way to interact with my girl as little as possible until it passed.  That is purely awful.

Are we setting our kids, and us, up for failure?  We view them as consciously being able to make good and bad behavioral choices and assume they are in full command of their faculties, but with inputs from crap food and potential meds on top of that, are they?  Is cardboard food sparking behavioral changes that we then medicate to fix, and then we keep cycling down from there? 

I realize I’m making a mental leap from just one dose of Zyrtec, but it’s not that far of a leap to make.  The main reason I was able to identify so quickly what was happening to her was because of her diet.  What about the families I read about online that had been going through this for a year or two, never connecting that a common med might be causing some of the behavioral issues– and I think about all the conflicts and anger that had to have arisen as a result in a time where a kiddo/family needs joy…

…unnecessary conflict and anger in these years where we shape who our little people are going to be and how they approach the world in-part by how we react to them, and how we interact as a family.

The behavior I had a brief personal glimpse of yesterday occurs daily at playgrounds and in homes, to the point where it’s just been accepted and parents are exasperated to find a solution.  Or an escape.

Like I said earlier, making things from scratch is a big undertaking in our current world.  We have many, many things to fill any time void we have, and very little time to carve out to spend in the kitchen.

But we must also recognize that’s a choice, and all choices have consequences.  Some consequences can be easily seen and tracked, like childhood obesity, but there may be others we must start to acknowledge as possibilities.  Like behavioral changes.

Where is the root value in how we’re spending our time, and should more of it be used making better food?

I don’t expect parents to battle a brick wall.  I didn’t yesterday.  But if you’re banging your head against that wall daily, try using a more effective tool to chisel away at it and see what happens.  Diet is the first step.  If that’s squared away, it allows us as parents to see the effects other inputs may be having on our children.

Like common medications that are supposed to be harmless and help, for example.

This is all just food for thought.  The next time a kid loses their shit or is just being an absolute mindless raging ass, pause to ask the question- are they fully in control?  Are their bodies being given the right building blocks to mentally succeed and allow the choice of good behavior to be an option?

Or are we just giving them mediocre soil to grow those skills in for themselves?