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What you read is true, problems become more obvious when the child enters school. This baby is a high risk child, not only the exposure but also the genetic make up. A mentally healthy person is not a homeless drug user, a lot of those people are self medicating serious mental health problems.100% Sure the child will be affected by the birth mothers choices, to which degree varies per child.

Pretty sure a very similar question has come up quite recently so you may want to search.Firstly, I'd say that ''meeting milestones' isn't really going to tell you anything. Milestones are set so low as to be pretty meaningless. All of mine consistently met milestones. Middly generally exceeded them. One now has an asd dx, the other dyslexia, ADHD and aspergers.The drugs are just one aspect. You also need to consider the fact that she was likely also to be abusing alcohol. She may not tell you but drugs and alcohol abuse generally go hand in hand. In which case you need also to think about fae. The facial characteristics don't have to be present.A violent and stressful pregnancy will have a huge impact on the baby. Imagine, you can hear music and soothing words in the womb. So presumably you can hear the screaming, shouting and your bm being abused.Then you need to consider why she was homeless. Why she was an abuser. Why was she self medicating. What mental health illness lies beneath all if this.Look very carefully at mental health history. At any behaviour whilst younger which would indicate why she turned to drugs.More often than not there's likely to be something.The fact is that most of the above will apply to an awful lot of babies in the care system now. And an awful lot of them will present with issues of one kind or another at some point.When you're adopting a baby then it's a leap in the dark. You just don't know what the future outcome is going to be despite doing all the research and reading.

My 16 year old dd was born methadone dependent and spent the first 2 months of life in a special care baby unit. She then spent the next 5 years being shunted around various family members and was exposed to high levels of abuse. She came to me aged 7.5...She is not always easy, in fact can be very difficult but the good times have always far outweighed the bad times and she seems to have mellowed with age and apart from smoking and drinking occasionally at the weekend when out with friends, has no major vices (though could all change of course). She has also just received her gcse results - 7 good grades including English, maths and science! I'm very proud of her!

I posted a link on this threadhttp://www.adoptionuk.org/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=64408&forumID=12&catID=2&search=1&searchstring=&sessionID=which is to an article looking at children with all kinds of drug exposure. It does separate out the different kinds of exposure, talks about the effects of more than one drug I seem to remember, and also talks about the different effects of remaining in birth family versus just drug exposure but not remaining in birth family.