7 Declarations About ‘Crack Babies’ That Were Flat-Out Wrong

Infant

Babies Doomed for Life

Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University who has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children, said her research found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. But she said the myth of the crack babies still lingers. She said cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children’s overall cognition and school performance — although some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.

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They Would Be a Burden to School Systems

Dr. Hurt’s team of researchers found just a slight difference between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls who hadn’t been exposed: At age 4, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the non-exposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition. But poverty was the main reason for any difference, Hurt concluded.

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