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Making Choices for Children 

A National Public Awareness & Education Campaign
Aimed at Returning the Power of Choice to Parents

The power to decide which medicines, if any, are best for children must be returned to the family. Schools and other government agencies must be stopped from conditioning public benefits -- such as education -- on the use or nonuse of psychoactive medications. At the same time parents must taught their legal rights and instructed on how to exercise them in the face of coercive school medication practices. The CCLE's Making Choices for Children campaign is designed to accomplish both tasks while raising public awareness of the cognitive liberty.

Without advocating for or against the use of psycho-stimulant drug therapy, the Making Choices for Children campaign works to:

• Educate and Empower Parents
  Parents have a legal right to decide, free of government coercion, which psychotropic medications, if any, are best for their kids. Many parent's however are unaware of their rights, and feel powerless in the face of pressure from school officials. 

• Inform Law and Policy Makers
  Those in power need to be educated in order to make wise, just, and compassionate laws. The CCLE's policy reports and written and spoken testimony aims to provide law and policy makers with the information and analysis they need in order to craft laws that respect and protect freedom thought.

• Raise Public Awareness
  A healthy democracy depends upon an informed and active citizenry. Our campaign provides accurate, up-to-date information on  emerging trends in the use of psycho-stimulant drugs to modify child behavior in the classroom. We also identify, analyze and recommend policy responses to those trends.

We have a comprehensive strategy for accomplishing these goals.

To begin the project, we launched this website in April 2004.

The website is designed to:

• Raise public awareness of coercive psychotropic medication policies in the schools;

• Identify and analyze legislation addressing the issue of schools and other government agencies pressuring parents to place their children on psycho-stimulants;

• Educate parents on their legal rights to make informed medication decisions for their children, free of government coercion;

• Collect and share diverse resources on the science, risks, and benefits of psycho-stimulant medications like Ritalin

• Provide project updates and announcements.
   

The campaign will also research and publish a non-partisan policy report on trends in the use of stimulant medication as a condition for the receipt of public education benefits nationwide, with a focus on how the administrative and legal consequences some parents face for choosing not to medicate their children threaten to erode longstanding common law parental consent rights. The report will include specific policy recommendations aimed at protecting the informed consent rights of parents. This report will provided to law and policy makers, reporters, parents, educators, and interested organizations. 

The campaign will also create and distribute a Parents’ Rights Kit. This kit will include plain language explanations of a parent's legal right to make voluntary and informed medication decisions for their children. Parents will learn what rights they have and how to exercise these rights when dealing with school authorities. The kit will also include information on science, risks, and benefits of psycho-stimulant medications like Ritalin. 

The Making Choices for Children campaign will utilize the Internet and broadcast media to educate the public about freedom of thought and to encourage parents to play an active role in determining whether psycho-stimulant medications are in their children’s best interest.

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