Proving that America isn't the only "Prozac nation," Australian physicians are now prescribing ADHD medication for children as young as two.

While we commonly see bumpers bearing the message "Hugs are better than drugs," you'd never know we believe it from our legalized-drug culture. Recently I cited statistics indicating that 20 million Americans, 40 percent of college students, and 1 out of 9 schoolchildren are on psychoactive medication.

And, incredibly, people now even give anti-depressants to pets, especially parrots. Polly wanna Prozac, I suppose.

Now, from the land down under, comes news that toddlers — some as young as two — are being prescribed ADHD drugs such as Ritalin.

I've often said that psychology is the only field in which the practitioners invent diseases and conditions for themselves to diagnose. This embrace of a proliferating number of newly-minted psychological disorders is simultaneously sad and ridiculous.

I attended church in Poland about five years ago and noticed that young children would sit quietly and attentively. This lay in stark contrast to my experiences in the U.S., where their age-mates carried coloring books and toys into the pews and still fidgeted and whined. O mystery of mysteries — what explains this difference? Those Poles must emerge from an anomalous genetic pool, indeed.

Then I think of a very charming friend I had many years ago. The son of a psychologist, he was diagnosed with a learning disability in the 1970s, before such designations were fashionable, and attended a special school for children so afflicted. Here is what he told me about himself and his fellow students (it's close to verbatim): "We thought it [the "conditions"] was all nonsense; it was just a way to get out of doing work."

Also many years ago, I read something that common-sense psychologist William S. Glasser wrote in one of his books. He said that depression is a learned behavior, embraced when young and then becoming habitual and unconscious. So, as it happens, at my place of employment at the time, there was a little lass of about nine years who consistently wore a face longer than Mr. Ed's.

Curious about this poster child for Sarafem, I asked, "Linda (name changed to protect the plaintive), why are you always so sad? Don't you know it's more fun to be happy than sad?" She told me this wasn't true, and when I asked why, she responded, "Because you get more attention when you're sad."

So now let's return to ADHD. There's no question in my mind that ADHD is nothing more than a medical name assigned to chronic misbehavior. It's about as valid as "Sibling Rivalry Disorder" and "Mathematics Disorder," which, I understand, can both be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

If my assessment carries little weight, being as I’m only informally in the mental health field (remember, I battle liberals), consider the wisdom of John Rosemond, one of those rare common-sense psychologists. He once said (I'm paraphrasing), "All children 'have ADD' up till age two, but if they're socialized properly, it's bred out of them."

Expanding on this, Rosemond says that in the same way a civilization can embrace a dysfunctional political paradigm, so can it adopt a dysfunctional parenting paradigm. It's not hard to understand. We're born savages, lacking impulse control, crying or lashing out when angry, screaming when excited.

Now, in the days of yore, parents understood that children had to be tamed. To that end, the former would punish them in a manner sufficient to deter bad behavior. Children thus learned to suppress their darker instincts and, over time, develop impulse control. It's really just a matter of abiding by that biblical counsel: "Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."

The fruits of this training — which, like any training, is habitual in nature — may be virtue, which is defined as a good habit. For instance, if a child is consistently forced to contain his temper, he may learn the virtue of patience.

But a prerequisite for instilling children with these good habits is that the parents practice good child-rearing habits. And again note that "habit" denotes consistency — regular discipline, guidance, unwavering moral messages, and modeling of behavior. Yet this is lacking today, as we have become a gratuitously permissive society, where spankings are sometimes forbidden, punishment is a dirty word, and morality is malleable.

Thus, people's moral, spiritual, and emotional development is often stunted. Children may not develop satisfactory self-control when little, and the result often is a ten-year-old with the impulse control of a three-year-old; he then may be diagnosed with "ADHD." As Rosemond once put it, "We are extending toddlerhood indefinitely."

Yet this is often just the first stage in a pattern of retarded development. Childhood can be extended into adolescence, and the latter well into adulthood. This perhaps explains why we have childish female teachers who develop amorous relations with 13-year-old boys and hear excuses for marijuana use such as "I tried it but didn't inhale” (a seventh-grade caliber cop-out if I ever heard one).

I'm not saying people can't have bona fide emotional problems. Some do. But I do say that whether it's a little child using sadness to get attention, faking a learning disorder to avoid work — or misbehaving because he knows he can get away with it — kids seem much smarter today than adults.

What is the solution? Save yourself some money, rise off the therapist's couch and resurrect tradition. People who possess a near-inerrant grasp of man's nature are called sages. As for those who pretend to we already have plenty of them.