AT A HOSPITAL IN BOSTON lies a baby girl who was born before her time -- three months early, weighing less than 3 lbs. Her tiny body is entangled in a maze of wires and tubes that monitor her vital signs and bring her food and medicine. Every so often she shakes uncontrollably for a few moments -- a legacy of the nerve-system damage that occurred when she suffered a shortfall of blood and oxygen just before birth. Between these seizures, she is unusually quiet and lethargic, lying on her side with one arm draped across her chest and the other bent to touch her face, sleeping day and night in the comfort of her cushioned warming table. At best, it will be three or four months before she is well enough to leave the hospital, and even then she may continue to shake from time to time.
AT A THERAPY CENTER IN NEW YORK CITY, the saddest child brought in one morning is three-year-old Felicia, a small bundle of bones in a pink dress, whose plastic hearing aids keep falling off, tangling with her gold earrings. She is ( deaf, and doctors are not sure how much she can see. She functions at the capacity of a four-month-old. Like a rag doll, she can neither sit nor stand by herself: her trunk is too weak and her legs are too stiff. A therapist massages and bends the little girl's legs, trying to make her relax. Next year her foster mother will put Felicia in a special school full time in hopes that the child can at least learn how to feed herself.
AT A SPECIAL KINDERGARTEN CLASS IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA, a five-year-old named Billie seems the picture of perfect health and disposition. As a tape recorder plays soothing music in the background, he and the teacher read alphabet cards. Suddenly Billie's face clouds over. For no apparent reason, he throws the cards down on the floor and shuts off the tape recorder. He sits in the chair, stony faced. "Was the music going too fast?" the teacher asks. Billie starts to say something, but then looks away, frowning. The teacher tries to get the lesson back on track, but Billie is quickly distracted by another child's antics. Within seconds, he is off his chair and running around.
These children have very different problems and prospects, but they all have one thing in common: their mothers repeatedly took crack cocaine, often in combination with other drugs, during pregnancy. That makes them part of a tragic generation of American youngsters -- a generation unfairly branded by some as "children of the damned" or a "biologic underclass." More often, they are simply called crack kids. A few have severe physical deformities from which they will never recover. In others the damage can be more subtle, showing up as behavioral aberrations that may sabotage their schooling and social development. Many of these children look and act like other kids, but their early exposure to cocaine makes them less able to overcome negative influences like a disruptive family life.
The first large group of these children was born in the mid-1980s, when hundreds of thousands of women began to get hooked on the cheap, smokable form of cocaine known as crack. The youngsters have run up huge bills for medical treatment and other care. Now the oldest are reaching school age, and they are sure to put enormous strain on an educational system that is already overburdened and underachieving.