Parents’ Perceptions on the Debated Parenting Practice of Cognitive Enhancement in Healthy Children and Adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First evidence shows that some parents engage in the health-endangering practice of (mis-)using prescription drugs to boost their children's school performance. But little is known about parental perspectives on this phenomenon. This study aims to better understand parents' perspectives on the non-medical use of prescription drugs to improve healthy children's cognitive functioning. We conducted twelve semi-structured face-to-face interviews with a diverse sample of parents in Germany, and applied qualitative content analysis to explore their perspectives on instrumentalizing prescription drugs for improving the performance of healthy children, including their underlying knowledge (gaps), moral evaluations, evaluations of accompanied risks and benefits, opinions on potential motivators, and wishes regarding policy-making. The results show that parents typically believed themselves knowledgeable about such prescription drug (mis-)use, although they were not aware of anyone in their social environment taking them for enhancement. Parents generally considered such behavior to be morally reprehensible, cheating, and similar to doping in sports, and they typically claimed that no situation or occasion could motivate them to administer prescription drugs to their healthy children. Health risks (including side effects or addiction) were a typical expectation of drug use. That doctors should give such drugs to healthy young people was seen as unjustifiable. The results suggest that morality and risk-benefit evaluations of parents play a major role in their decision-making concerning this potentially risky instrumentalization of non-medical drugs. These insights are of distinct importance, especially for future research and further discussions on this topic, such as an evidence-based public dialog and ethics debates. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41465-022-00243-w.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".