Worse still, I wonder how many of those kids are permanently put on drugs.
As an ADHD child myself, on various drugs from grade 1 to OAC (Grade 13 in Ontario), I was put on drugs, but I assure you that by the time I reached the end of school, there was no permanently about it. Maybe when you're younger it's easier to make a child take the drugs, but as they get older and more independent, and as they start to see the effects the drugs have on their personality, there is no permanence unless they want it.
By the time I reached my final years of high school, I hated every day I took my pill. I used to not take them over the summer, and can still remember the week before school started, taking my pills and feeling like I wasn't me anymore. First of all, I was on Dexedrine, which severely impacted my appetite (which is probably why I was a bean pole in high school), but the effect on my personality was drastic. I guess that was the intended effect of the pills, to change me from wildly unfocused, silly and far too chatty/outgoing into a quiet, obedient child who would do as they were told. But as the person taking it, and feeling myself changing every time I took the pill, I found (and still find) the whole thing very unsettling.
Having said that, I am now dating a wonderful girl who is startlingly like me, except she didn't have parents who made her take the ADD meds. Seeing how much of a mess her education was, how much it impacted her social and family life and even her career, made me respect the decision my parents made for me, even if I still disagree with it. Without the drugs I took through elementary and highschool, the odds are I wouldn't have passed, or learned as much as I have, and I probably wouldn't be where I am in life.
To bring things back to the subject at hand, over-diagnosing ADD/ADHD puts millions of kids through the crap I had to go through, as well as putting their parents through it both emotionally and financially. I'm sure my dad (who will most likely read this) could comment on how hard the decision to put me on drugs was, and keeping me on them, fighting me sometimes daily to take them, but I assume the decision wasn't always easy. However, I'm sure these TV parents, which my parents were most assuredly not, enjoy their quieter, more docile children, so maybe they don't care if their child is mis-diagnosed.
ADD/ADHD is a real thing, that should be treated with drugs or behaviour modification (I went through various training classes about "coping skills", learning to identify ADD moments and control them). Just assigning any child who is energetic, or even just a normal 6/16 year old, to the ADD/ADHD bucket in hopes of making them docile is tantamount to a crime. Modifying someones behaviour through drugs for your own convenience and for the teachers convenience is morally reprehensible.