Description: The theoretical starting point of this paper lies in the work of Shilling (1993) and his suggestion that the human body is socially and biologically unfinished at birth. Shilling describes the relationship between the body and society as reciprocal: society works on the body, just as the body works on society. In this way, Shillings theory promises to reconnect what social constructionism separated. It draws attention to how the body and society work on each other. While Shilling devotes only little attention to childhood, the break-through of the paradigm of the Sociology of Childhood resulted in the development of studies that started to show how the notion of the body as socially and biologically unfinished might be worked through in relation to children. Children's bodies then appear in a variety of roles: in the construction of social relations, meanings and experiences between children themselves and with adults, as products of and resources for agency, action and interaction; and as sites for socialization through embodiment. In this, the studies within the paradigm of the Sociology of Childhood function as illustrations of how powerful discursive formations can be in shaping how children's bodies are perceived, understood and produced. Methodology: In line with these ambitions of the Paradigm of the Sociology of Childhood, I want to focus in my paper on the discursive formations on children with hyperactivity, actually defined as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). As the diagnosis of children with hyperactivity is still very controversial and as the definition of hyperactivity changed rather rapidly over the last decennia, hyperactivity seems very difficult to visualize. This results in a climate of controversy and doubt in which it is very difficult to parents to make the right decisions about the treatment of their children. According to Conrad (1992) the scientific and public discourses on children with hyperactivity can be regarded as a typical illustration of what he calls the "medicalization of childhood". Two topics will be elaborated: - a history of the idea of hyperactivity, starting with some concepts of Progressivism and ending with ADHD, in which I will try to illustrate the struggle between the medical, psychological and educational explanatory models; - an overview of the representations of hyperactive children throughout the twentieth century, showing how these representations (in journals for practitioners and in popular magazines) relate to the dominant scientific discourses