Third-Graders Form Bond With Drug-Addicted Babies

A sign in Cathi Budd’s third-grade classroom reads: “You Have the Power to Solve These Problems.”

In simpler times, the only problems third-graders needed to worry about was “i before e except after c” and how to keep the dopey kid next to you from untying your shoelaces. But times change and, inevitably I suppose, so must third-graders. I’m trying to remember the first time I heard the word “pregnant,” and I think it was about seventh grade. I didn’t use it in a sentence until I was in college. I heard it half a dozen times Thursday in Budd’s class.

Today, these 8- and 9-year-olds are already old hands at learning about society’s underbelly. Anti-drug programs start as early as kindergarten in some schools, and although you wish it didn’t have to be that way, you find yourself applauding the effort.

So it was Thursday in Budd’s class at Serrano Elementary School in Villa Park, where her class of 31 listened to registered nurse Kathy Ankenman talk about babies born to drug-addicted mothers. Budd’s pupils first heard of drug-addicted babies earlier in the school year during a drug awareness program and asked her, “How can that be?”

Budd explained it to them, and it led to the children wanting to do something to help. So, in recent weeks, they’ve been selling 50-cent raffle tickets for a quilt. The money they’ve raised, about $200 so far, will go for a rocking chair for the nursery at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center.

So, Budd’s pupils have formed something of a bond with future newborns. And as Ankenman talked a bit about premature infants and drug-exposed babies, Budd’s students showed their level of sophistication.

“Does the same thing happen if mothers smoke?” one boy asked.

Mothers who smoke tend to have smaller babies, and those children tend to be undernourished, Ankenman said.

Budd’s class seemed especially touched by Ankenman’s photo of a premature baby who weighed 2 pounds, 1 ounce at birth. What the children thought was a bracelet around the newborn’s wrist turned out to be Ankenman’s wedding ring--a graphic demonstration that hushed the students.

As she talked about the drug-exposed syndrome, the normally animated students fell silent. “Sometimes, babies die and there isn’t anything we can do,” Ankenman said. “But the saddest thing for the nurses and doctors is when the mom uses drugs and the baby is exposed to it, because while we feel so sad for the mom, we also feel that maybe there was something she could have done to avoid it.”

Drug-exposed babies are already showing up in Orange County schools and their numbers are certain to increase. Experts say these children are prone to irritability, short attention spans and learning disabilities. In those regards, their classroom performance will resemble that of other “problem children;” in short, drug-exposed pupils will add to an existing classroom problem.

Studies on drug-exposed children still are unfolding, says Dottie Andrews, an official with the county’s March of Dimes chapter. Nationally, studies indicate that about 11% of newborns have drug exposure. A recent study from Sacramento put that county’s figure at about 9%, Andrews said.

While there are no figures for Orange County, where about 50,000 babies were born last year, Andrews said the drug-exposure problem is known to cross social and economic lines, leaving no particular locality less vulnerable than another.

Meanwhile, Budd and countless others are among the anonymous soldiers in the drug war. “My whole emphasis,” Budd says, “is on choices and alternatives, so they don’t feel like victims in life or that everything is fatalistic, that they have no options.”

That’s why the design on the quilt, sewn by the mother of one of Budd’s friends, features 30 squares designed by the children--each listing an alternative to dabbling in drugs. And while the themes are simplistic--”Go for a Walk,” “Talk to Friends,” or “Go to Church,”--it represents the children saying “yes” to things instead of just saying “no” to drugs, Budd said.

We adults know this drug syndrome is all part of a series of choices these third-graders will be making in the years ahead. For now, their hearts are all in the right places--giving a rocking chair to soothe newborns in a hospital and condemning the role that drugs played in the rocky first few years of some unfortunate babies.

We can only hope that as Budd’s pupils hit junior high and high school, they’ll remember the simple truth they once read on the wall of their third-grade classroom when life was a lot simpler:

“You Have the Power to Solve These Problems.”