Suggested behavioral interventions in the classroom to assist students prenatally exposed to drugs
✍ Scribed by T. F. McLaughlin; Betty F. Williams; Vikki F. Howard
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 182 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-0847
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The population of children exposed prenatally to alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, and other legal or illegal substances has been rapidly growing in America. The known characteristics of this group include de®cits in rule-governed behavior, impulsivity, attention to task, language, sleep attachment, learning, social competence, coordination, hypersensitivity to environmental stimuli, and conduct problems. The purpose of this paper was to describe the characteristics of this population and match known, empirically demonstrated, data-based strategies, such as teacher attention and praise, token reinforcement programs, daily report cards, contingency contracting, self-instructional training, self-management, peer tutoring, Direct Instruction, and combining behavior therapy with stimulant medication therapy, to speci®c academic and social de®cits in children with parental histories of substance abuse. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Substance abuse by pregnant women tends to aect prenatally exposed children in various ways. At one end of the continuum, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) presents the most dramatic and severe impact, and is also the most extensively researched and documented. Cocaine use appears to cause subtle eects for which the long-term impact has yet to be determined. Exposure to other substances such as marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, tobacco, and caeine also have documented deleterious eects of greater and lesser degrees along the continuum (Howard, Williams, & Port, 1997). Of these pharmacological teratogens, marijuana and alcohol have been identi®ed as the most frequently used secondary drugs (Hingson, Alpert, Day, Dooling, Kayne, Morelock, Oppenheimer, & Zuckerman, 1982).
Considerable attention has been paid to the characteristics and needs of children who have FAS/Fetal Alcohol Eects (FAE), or prenatal exposure to cocaine/crack or other drugs (Burgess &