Emotional Development of Children Explosed to Drugs

Human development has been described as "the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion" (Shweder, 1990, p. 1). The traditional assumption is that human psychology and emotion have universality by reason of "central processing mechanism" and that there is "a fundamental division" between that mechanism and the "context," or external environment in which the psyche is made to function (Shweder, 1990, p. 5). Human development has as its starting point of analysis not the individual central processing mechanism but rather context per se. As Goodnow, Miller, and Kessel put it (1995, p. 2), the discipline "offers a unified view of development and culture as intertwined processes." Shweder's formulation is that human cognition, learning, and self

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(1995, p. 11), the central nervous system is at special risk from prenatal exposure to cocaine and similar toxins because it can adversely affect physical development of the entire neural system. This in turn implicates adverse evolution of "learning ability, responses to stress, and emotional development." Data developed in relation to FAS indicate that in addition to such physical abnormalities as low birth weight, limb and cardiac defects, malformed craniums, retardation, perinatal alcohol exposure appears to foster actual brain damage, in turn fostering behavioral abnormalities (Randall & Riley, 1995). However, Coles (1994) cautions that the timing and length of alcohol exposure have not been definitively correlated with specific behavioral problems. Interestingly, drug-using mothers appear to be in the forefront of complaining about their drug-exposed infants' emotional-bonding and behavioral failures (Hawley, Halle, Drasin, & Thomas, 1995). A study comparing children of methadone-using mothers with children of nonusers found that the methadone-using mothers had greater complaints about their children's behavior than their nonusing counterparts (De Cubas & Field, 1993). It has elsewhere been observed that the direct physical
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Miller Kessel, Jaudes Ekwo, Fisher Apfel, , Landry Whitney, Griffith Chasnoff, Lewis Bendersky, Syndrome FAS, Copans Klein, Potocky McDonald, emotional development, human development, prenatal drug exposure, rubin 1995, jaudes ekwo, shweder 1990, prenatal drug, drug exposure, pregnant women, alcohol exposure, infants exposed, jaudes ekwo 1997, miller kessel 1995, neonatal childhood emotional, potocky mcdonald 1996,
Approximate Word count = 2546
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)