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'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
91–100 of 265 posts
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#92"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." That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age s…
1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have No I wouldn't, because: a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds. b) I doubt the syste…
Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that, "Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2 percent) had witnessed a shooting."
So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#93Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act ) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure ) It's alcohol, a legal drug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome )
Of the 110 "crack babies" followed for 25 years, only 12 finished college or were on track to finish college, while 2 were shot dead. So it's only 6 times more likely for inner city kids to graduate from college than to get shot to death?
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. The prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome is less than 5% for babies of women who drink more than 14 drinks per week during pregnancy: http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=2... . There's very little evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy are bad for babies: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.ht…
My understanding of the reason for total abstinence is while there may be a shoulder in the graph (eg. more than 5 drinks a week) beyond which FAS begins to take effect, nobody knows where that point is. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to run a controlled test for. It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a re…
The studies have not proven that there is a level of alcohol consumption below which there are no negative effects, but they fail to demonstrate long-term negative effects from low levels of alcohol consumption.
Now, absence of proof is not proof of absence, but in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't proven there aren't harmful effects at low levels? That's not how we generally do things. We only say "no" when we have actual evidence that some activity is harmful.
The reason we do it is not because science demonstrates there is a danger. We do it because we as a society love to control women, their behavior and their bodies, and pregnancy offers a great opportunity to exert that control.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#95"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." That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age s…
> E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%.
This is insane logic. Think about your 20 closest friends. Do you think that 7 of them saw somebody get shot by the time they were 7? I don't know where you grew up but that is definitely not my experience! Continuing the same reasoning, 60% of all 18 year olds should have seen someone be shot. Again, not where I come from.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error. "Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.
IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor. Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from…
> Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty.
I appreciate that you are trying really hard to make an argument, but you literally have no idea what you are talking about.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're presenting facts, the "total abstinence" people don't like that. I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.
Can you really speak with such authority about all of Europe? In Sweden, where I live, alcohol and pregnancy are not suppose to mix. For example, translating from http://www.vardguiden.se/Tema/Gravid/Livsstilsfragor/Alkohol... : "Since no one knows where the border lies, the recommendations in Sweden and many other countries are to not drink alcohol at all during pregnancy." Or translating from http://www.lakartidnin…
You're right, that's the recommendation
But about this I'm not so sure: "most women also stop drinking alcohol when they discover that they are pregnant."
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're presenting facts, the "total abstinence" people don't like that. I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.
>You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. You are very, very wrong about this.
Yes, I said it wrong.
What I should have said is this: It's trivial to find a woman that has consumed alcohol during pregnancy
Especially in the cases of older woman (whose sons and daughters are adults now)
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error. "Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.
IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor. Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from…
IQ is not abstract 'perfect world' capacity. It's a reflection of how well developed your brain actually is (to the limits of what areas it can measure). Without nutrition, the brain doesn't build actual neural capacity, and the IQ is lower than well-fed peers.
Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine." It's a good thing to back up with a scientific study and facts, but I'd hardly call it surprising (the article did) except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like. Another interesting part of the bias might be that I've never heard the term "crack baby" (or similar) outside the c…
Crack Cocaine and Cocaine are not quite the same thing. Cocaine is known and used in the US as well. Crack was a US ghetto phenomenon, it is not used as some code-word for blacks. The results are surprising in the sense that what was said, and generally believed even by professionals in the field, at the height of the issue was that it would be impossible for these children to develop at all. Poverty has a known affe…
Crack Cocaine and Cocaine are not quite the same thing.
Do you have any links to support this? I had always heard that chemically, they are both "cocaine" and the "crack" preparation simply allows quicker intake and thus a faster high.