But being poor was -
Poverty. The factor was poverty.
Interesting study, but I thought I’d save time for people who don’t want to read the whole article.
The answer was given in the first sentence of the OP.
Don’t be so harsh. Rachellelogram grew up poor, so her reading comprehension isn’t what it could be.
Heh.
I’ve been hearing for years that FAS is much worse.
I wouldn’t exactly call 12 college grads out of 110 a big success. 10.9% We need a comparison of other kids from similar backgrounds that weren’t crack babies. Why weren’t the high school grads reported? That would be more informative then college grads. If we really want to compare abilities of crack babies vs other babies.
It is encouraging to hear that the crack babies aren’t a “lost generation”. That they are functioning in society.
The whole ‘crack baby’ thing was questioned by many at the time. But in the midst of the joint government/media effort to market crack cocaine to the masses people forgot about looking for facts. At the time claiming a new harmful effect of crack would get you on the news and a meeting with the highly placed officials. Attempting to counter that information wasn’t going to do anything for your career.
A pretty stunning portrait of life in inner city poverty.
They did have controls, I think the upshot of the study referenced in the article was that there were no substantive differences in intellectual or scholastic performance between the non-crack baby controls and the “crack babies”. Performance was substandard across the board for both groups which the study attributed directly to poverty. The differences between the crack babies and non-crack babies in the demographic cohort were almost non-existent over time which flies in the face of what the doctors and researchers who initiated the longitudinal study expected.
I understand why they eliminated premature infants from the study, but doing so produces its own skew on the results. Having been a crack baby may not give rise to additional crack-specific developmental problems, but it does indisputably raise the risk of being born premature and having all the developmental problems associated with prematurity.
Oh shit, my eyes swiped right past that. Sorry!
Interesting. I went to elementary school with a boy who had severe emotional and developmental problems. His dad told my mom that he and his wife had adopted him and that his biological mother had been addicted to crack. I suppose there could have been a host of other issues going on though that contributed to his problems (Poverty not being one of them though. I grew up in a fairly affluent area).
Along the same lines, there was an episode of “Hoarders” a while back in which the hoarder had adopted a child who had been born addicted to cocaine, and this child had severe development issues (as in violent outbursts and inability to speak). I wondered at the time whether the circumstances of his birth in fact explained his disorder, and it sounds like there must have been other major problems at work.
I’ve met one “crack baby” in my life and he was pretty messed up developmentally too (even though he was adopted by a well-off family). But I guess it’s good that he’s an outlier.
Another thing to remember is that a lot of the mothers of these so-called “crack babies” were using a lot of other street drugs during their pregnancy (including alcohol, which absolutely will cause developmental issues). So, while it may be true that crack/cocaine use during pregnancy doesn’t seem to cause any issues, that doesn’t mean every kid labeled a crack baby is ok.
eta: that seems especially important to point out when it’s a situation where someone’s mom heard it from a friend’s dad who heard it from the agency who got it from the birth mother. In a situation like that, there’s really no telling what was ingested during the pregnancy.
This kid had violent outbursts although he was able to speak normally. He was just very socially awkward (aside from his outbursts) and had extreme difficulty keeping up with what we were learning in class. He was taken out of class a lot for one on one work with a special ed teacher.
I’m actually from the same area as you. The elementary school I went to in Reston had a dedicated center for kids with emotional and developmental issues. He wasn’t in the center though as his parents wished to mainstream him and their other adopted children who each had varying degrees of disabilities.
You do know that nationwide, the 2010 high school dropout rate is 7.4%. 8% if you are black. Of those that graduate, 70% go on to college, 69% of black students. Of those, only 57% earn a degree, 40% of black kids (most kids in the study were black).
So out of 100 black kids, 92 graduate from high school, 63 go to college, 25 graduate.
(Out of 100 kids, 37 earn four year degrees. It isn’t a terribly high rate removing race from the equation)
Poor black kids graduate from college at a little less than half the rate of the general African American population - and the study says that there is no difference in that rate if your mom was a crack user when she was pregnant.
I hadn’t noticed it, either.