The media has been slow to recognize the devastation caused to thousands of young children by the methamphetamine addiction of their parents. Meth stayed under the radar screen for years, for a number of reasons. It's a drug of rural poverty more than urban ghettos. Users can make their own, out of legally purchased ingredients, cutting out the international and organized-crime elements that raise the law-enforcement profile of other illicit drugs.

Today, the New York Times weighed in on meth and kids with an informative article by Kate Zernike, under the headline "A Drug Scourge Creates Its Own Form of Orphan." Zernike reported on how a flood of children removed from the homes of meth-addicted parents are straining the limited resources of child welfare agencies in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and other states. It's a real crisis, and it deserves our attention.

But now that the mainstream media is weighing in on meth, reporters and editors would do well to think long and hard before affixing these kids with a label that declares them the unsalvageable wreckage of a social crisis. It isn't going to help them, and it may well turn out to be untrue.

What does it mean to label these kids as meth's "own form of orphan"? When I see that, I think back to another media-labeled "class" of children, the so-called crack babies of the '80s. Yes, the crack epidemic was real, and its impact on children and communities was horrific. But since them, many children born to crack-addicted mothers have have grown to promising young adulthood -- no thanks to the crack baby label.

If you want to know how some of those kids felt about it, take a look at the March 2004 edition of Represent!, the magazine written by foster youth and produced by Youth Communications. The entire issue, "Crack Babies All Grown Up," is a demonstration of the resilience of some of these exceptional children, and an exploration of the damage they felt was done to them by the label.

The NYT magazine recently looked back at another such "doomed" cohort, kids born HIV-positive, expected to live only a few difficult and painful years, who are now entering adulthood. Our assumptions about their futures, or lack thereof, have left us oddly unprepared to help them adjust to the prospect of adult life, work, love -- and somehow less able than we should be to celebrate their very existence. (One of our interns, Julie Garfield, recently wrote about a special summer camp for HIV-positive adolescents that tries to give them at least a brief experience of carefree summer life, before returning to the problems of who to tell, how to not tell, how to live with HIV.)

My point is not that we should minimize the damage wrought by meth -- but that kids will always surprise us with their strength, their persistence, and their ability to seize life, and that we should celebrate and encourage their strength rather than burden them with dire labels that are hard to shake.