As the biomedical complex gradually expands its jurisdiction to more and more social realms, focusing on not only the transformations of deviations and life events into diseases, but also on health, on the definitions of risks, on enhancement, the clinical gaze has been settling in and colonizing the life cycle, from birth to death. Currently, it prevails an organicist and biological vision of the child, which makes it vulnerable and liable to diagnosis based on behaviors defined as problematic, understood as symptoms of mental disorders treatable with drugs. Children’s problems constitute a growing market to psychotropic drugs, a pharmacological solution widely adopted, especially in what concerns to the prescription of stimulants and antidepressants (Conrad, 2005). The diagnosis of the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the prescription of stimulant drugs to treat it marked the colonization on a large scale of childhood (Cohen, 2006). A recent report from General Directorate of Health (DGS, 2015), concluded that Portuguese children up to 14 years of age consume over 5 million of doses per year of methylphenidate, a psychoactive drug used to treat hyperactivity and attention deficit. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 mothers of children diagnosed with ADHA, we aim to analyze mother’s perception of ADHA and how they make sense of the process that goes from the construction of their children’s behaviors as problematic to the decision of seeking for a medical intervention. We also aim to discuss the psychosocial impacts of the diagnosis on children and on their social relations. As main conclusions we stress that most mothers only understood their children’s behavior as problematic when teachers, family or friends alerted them to that fact, stressing the possibility of an underlying medical condition. Teachers, in most of the cases, acted as a driver for a medical solution. Mothers didn’t understand the ADHD as a “real” disease, seeing it a behavioral problem that needs medical surveillance and intervention through medication. School problems as well as disruptive behavior of children, both of them with consequences on their social acceptance, were the main concerns expressed by the interviewees. Mothers furthermore stated some individual and social consequences of the medical label of ADHD as the social isolation experienced by their children (and even by themselves) and a perception of a diminished self as a result of having a disease that makes them different before themselves and before others. We finish arguing that is crucial to critically reflect upon the role of the engines of biomedicalization in the commodification of children’s emotions and behaviors, deconstructing the underlying interests and discussing the social risks of that process and its consequences to children, families and to society, as a whole.

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Childhood,biomedicalization,ADHD