“Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said of the so called “crack babies” born of a wave of crack cocaine addicted mothers in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Experts agreed. This was a lost generation, children doomed by their exposure to massive amounts of drugs in-utero. Some even predicted that crime rates would soar when they reached adulthood. But 20 years later crime rates are at record lows and many of these children are doing well.
Of course, there are still plenty of children born into drug addiction who have struggled over the last decades, but research has been unable to parse whether their troubles are rooted in their mother’s crack addiction or whether it’s a lack of parental care and early exposure to crime and poverty that has weighed them down. The fact that many former “crack babies” who found loving homes have prospered indicates the later.
While cocaine use during pregnancy does clearly affect fetal development, including producing children who have a tendency towards poor impulse control, the “super predators” that some doctors believed crack babies would grow into never emerged. The results of maternal cocaine use on children seem to vary wildly, depending on the environment the children are raised in.
Barry Lester, a psychologist at Brown University who leads the largest federal study of children with prenatal cocaine exposure says, “People are looking for a single statement: ‘Cocaine does this, or cocaine does that.’ It’s just not that simple. What I almost invariably wind up telling them is, ‘As far as we know, a good environment can make up for some, if not all, of the deficits that are caused by the drug, although it’s no guarantee.”
