The grave consequences of cocaine dependency and addiction for the individual are widely understood. In parents such conditions can have a particularly tragic impact since cocaine has great potential for impairing a parent’s ability to properly care for their children with lifelong consequences for both the children and parent. Understanding the impact of cocaine on human parental behavior is dauntingly complex as its abuse can cooccur with abuse of other drugs and with a variety of biological and societal factors (Chasnoff, 1987, 1988; Oro and Dixon, 1987; Frank et al., 1988) that confound our understanding of the impact of the drug itself. Less considered in examining the impact of cocaine on human parental behavior is the fact that within the human population, the number of people who engage in occasional or recreational use of substances with abuse potential, including cocaine, is much larger than the number of people who are diagnosed clinically with substance dependency or addiction (Warner et al., 1995; SAMHSA, 2001–2003; O’Brien and Anthony, 2005). Since this is the case for all age groups including women of reproductive age, we speculate that the population in which cocaine could affect the care of children is larger than the population of those who have progressed to the state of cocaine dependency and addiction. Considering that human parenting behavior has both biological roots as well as cultural and learned features is helpful in addressing the complex issue of the impact of cocaine on parenting experimentally. Further, parental behavior has both outwardly visible caregiving activities apparent in the interaction of the parent with their offspring and the underlying processes of parental motivation, which begins antecedent to caregiving and continues throughout parent–offspring interaction. The fundamental biological components of human parenting are generated by genetic and central nervous system processes very much in common with all mammals. These processes normally lead all parents to allocate a substantial proportion of time and energy to caregiving for the young in a manner that is relevant for their species. In humans, this substantial allocation of parental resources occurs over prolonged periods of time and includes the influences of cultural and ‘‘sentient’’influences unique to humans that then presumably interact with the outcomes of these fundamental biological processes yielding human parental behavior. Laboratory animal models of parental behavior provide a reductionist, mechanistic, and ultimately controllable and simplified model that offers the possibility of uncovering the CNS processes of normal parental behavior, thus allowing determination of how cocaine may derail it. Animal models of parental behavior rely on the operational definition of parental behavior in a species-specific framework. The largest and most detailed literature on the biology underlying parental behavior has been generated using the laboratory rat model (Rosenblatt et al., 1979; Numan and Insel, 2003; Lonstein and Morrell, 2007). In rats, only the postpartum female cares for the pups, hence the term maternal behavior. The rat model of maternal behavior is commonly used with the unstated working hypothesis that it has construct validity for general CNS processes that underlie normal maternal behavior in humans, just as the rat models of drug dependency are hypothesized to have such validity for human drug dependency (Epstein et al., 2006). Both models are commonly considered to have strong face validity for the human condition.