The Philadelphia Inquirer has a
story on a 25-year-long longitudinal study of 224 children (110 actually participated for the full 25 years) that set out to show the dangers of uterine crack cocaine exposure to children. Instead, they wound up showing the dangers of poverty:
At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children
was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed 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.
"We went looking for the effects of cocaine," Hurt said. But after a
time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on?' "
While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls
performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental
and intellectual measures compared to the norm. Hurt and her team began
to think the "something else" was poverty.
Basically, the study determined that poverty is really bad for children. It's not hard to think of better headlines for this story (Poverty Bad for Children: Science).
As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease
out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On
the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home -
measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language
stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On
the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen
someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen
someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the
kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those children who reported a
high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and
anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.
