Bullying comes from all places. Not just the insecure kid who needs to put others down to feel important. Adults are guilty of bullying as well. In "Balloon" we wanted to explore all the ways society can bully a boy into a narrow version of a "man". In researching we came across this article on Esquire.com by Ryan D'Agostino, titled "The Drugging of the American Boy."
"We are pathologizing boyhood," says Ned Hallo-well, a psychiatrist who has been diagnosed with ADHD himself and has co-written two books about it, Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction. "God bless the women's movement—we needed it—but what's happened is, particularly in schools where most of the teachers are women, there's been a general girlification of elementary school, where any kind of disruptive behavior is sinful. What I call the 'moral diagnosis' gets made: You're bad. Now go get a doctor and get on medication so you'll be good. And that's a real perversion of what ought to happen. Most boys are naturally more restless than most girls, and I would say that's good. But schools want these little goody-goodies who sit still and do what they're told—these robots—and that's just not who boys are."