Mal Fletcher comments on the overuse of drugs like Ritalin to medicate children's behaviour.

I've worked with teenagers and young adults, on one level or another, for three decades and I'm constantly impressed by their ability to adapt to an often confusing world.

However, their adaptive powers are greatly impacted by the quality of individual care they have received as children.

Over the next two to three decades, automation will bring massive changes to almost every aspect of human life.

In recognition of this fact, Sony has a wing of its research facility in Japan devoted to the study of what it calls "Robot Anthropology".

This discipline focusses on how engagement with robots will impact upon even the finest points of day-to-day human experience.

The challenges of underemployment aside, robotic machines will bring many benefits. Self-regulating and self-educating machines will be capable of performing many human activities - and out-performing us in surprising ways.

However, the one thing a machine cannot do is empathise, because by definition empathy requires a shared human experience.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to be parents, grandparents, teachers or child-carers might bear that in mind the next time we treat technology as a babysitter.

In time, no doubt, the significant advances currently underway in medical science - and the public's growing awareness of mental health issues - will lead to the development of more efficacious drugs than we have today.

We will see new drugs which are able to treat particular symptoms in more focused ways. Treatments for mental health issues won't be as broad-brush as they often are today.

However, children will never develop as they should without meaningful interaction with adults - and particularly their parents.