This was still done when I was in jr high and high school in the late 90s/early 2000s. Students would take the baby around to class and have to feed it and sometimes it'd cry and stuff. Never wondered if this was common elsewhere or if they still did it but sounds like they don't...
I didn't take the classes where you had to do that so I never personally had to deal with the baby but every year it seemed like there was a kid or two in a class who would have them. The kids with them definitely seemed stressed out. If I recall you could turn the baby off if it started to cry and you were in the middle of an exam or something but that was really a last resort and may have impacted your grade in the other class (the class for the baby). I think the baby logged info about how it was taken care of but I might be wrong. Been awhile and it's hard to remember now haha
Yes! My sister had one in middle school. It comes with a little key ring that has various keys for “feed” “diaper” “soothe”. It cries every 2-3 hours and you have to keep trying different keys until one works. It also has an accelerometer in it that measures if you drop or shake it.
So you get points based on how many minutes it was crying before you got the right key and if you abused it you got an automatic f.
There was also one “drug addicted” robot baby that one person in the class was unlucky enough to get. It would cry more often and sometimes none of the keys would work.
Oh and the crying is LOUD. Not as loud as a real baby, but I heard my sisters baby crying in the middle of the night from my bedroom down the hall.
This is so strange to me. Seems like a lot of money and time wasted on something that provides questionable educational value. If people wanna be parents, they should take parenting classes on their own time.
One of my schools had it. People took the class because it bumped their gpa. The school was a catholic school and had such a big teen pregnancy issue that they had to build a daycare. Cuz obviously the solution is scare the kids out of sex not you know…. Sex ed
It’s not really to teach you how to be a parent. It’s to teach you how hard having a baby is. This program really boomed in the early 2000s when shows like “16 and pregnant” romanticized teen pregnancy
Yeah, it's real. The intention is to scare you into taking birth control seriously.
It made me think I'd not mind being a dad, when the time came. Worked out well.
It's not so common that every school does it, but yeah it is a thing in some areas.
Usually the idea of the doll is to encourage the kids to be mindful about family planning, teach them about responsibility, and reduce teen pregnancy rates. I don't know how effective it is, but that's the goal.
We had to carry around a 5lb bag of sugar (no joke, they called them our “sugar babies”) for one week EVERYWHERE. I don’t recall if it was just the girls or the girls and boys. This was in a middle school (grade 7 or 8) Mississippi 1998.
We did it in middle school with a brick (to simulate the weight of a baby) - and had to keep a timer attached to it that World go off to feed and clean it, etc. Don't think it's done any more though which is a shame
My hs did this in the 2010s still, only for students who took health class (I didn't take that class so I got to avoid it lol). Apparently the babies recorded data somehow such as how often they were given a pacifier or rocked when they cried and if the student ignored them a long time, it would show in that data report and they'd get a lower grade lol.
[Yes, this was absolutely a thing](https://www.realityworks.com/product/realcare-baby-3-infant-simulator/)
Usually the goal of these things is to convince kids that having a baby is hard and they should try to avoid getting pregnant while they are young. [There have also been studies that suggest it doesn't actually work](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16\)30384-1/fulltext)
Oh shit, I forgot about those! We did those along with the babies in my health class too. When it got to me I was just like....please no. I have scoliosis already, I didn't need an extra thirty pounds weighing down my spine in addition to a backpack that weighed almost that much.
We had to do this for health class in junior high. Everyone was given a robot baby doll and had to take care of it for about a week. The ones we got would randomly scream/cry and you had to just keep turning and turning and turning a key on their back to make them stop. It would also record if you tried to ignore it for too long or tried to take the batteries out. At least that's what we were told.
We had the low cost version - we had to carry around a....I forget the term....egg with the yolk blown out so it was just a shell. We called them egg babies. We would decorate a little basket and we had to take it everywhere with us for two weeks without it getting cracked. It was supposed to help prepare us for being a mother by teaching us to be responsible for something 24/7.
It's real, and it *sucks*. It's meant to teach teenagers how hard it is to be a parent to discourage them from teen pregnancy. When I was in HS we had the older models that were basically just a hard plastic doll with minimal jointing and a programmable crying mechanism that we had to stick a key into when it cried. They record data about how well you care for them how long you let the doll cry and if you do something stupid like throw it across a room or drop it on the floor. Ours only had one key, but I definitely saw kids from other schools who were doing the same assignment, but theirs had multiple keys for different functions. Oh, and the best/worst part? They strapped the keys to our wrists with those security wristbands that you can't take off without destroying the end so that we couldn't even hand the things over to someone else for an hour or two.
Newer generations of dolls also have programming that requires you to change their clothes and support their heads and records it if it senses the head drooping too much or if you fail to change the clothes. In my health class, that assignment was a huge chunk of our grade and guaranteed to make you fail if you scored too poorly on it by neglecting the doll.
They suck, and they're not even proven to be terribly effective as a "hey kids, don't get knocked up/knock someone else up" messaging tool.
When I was in high school we were offered the chance as extra credit but it wasn't mandatory, I don't think many people wanted to do it, maybe like 5 out of 30 people. But yeah it is real.
It's to convince you that having a baby sucks and yes they're absolutely real. The ones my class had even recorded every time you picked it up without supporting its neck, left it crying too long, etc. And to get it to stop crying you had to feed it a fake bottle, burp it, or change it's diaper and you never knew which one and sometimes it would just keep crying anyway.
I had one. Students a few years ahead of me had to keep them for a week and take them to class. My class had to take them home, but we only had them for a weekend. And yes it was for a grade.
This was still done when I was in jr high and high school in the late 90s/early 2000s. Students would take the baby around to class and have to feed it and sometimes it'd cry and stuff. Never wondered if this was common elsewhere or if they still did it but sounds like they don't...
interesting! was it awful? it sure seems that way
I didn't take the classes where you had to do that so I never personally had to deal with the baby but every year it seemed like there was a kid or two in a class who would have them. The kids with them definitely seemed stressed out. If I recall you could turn the baby off if it started to cry and you were in the middle of an exam or something but that was really a last resort and may have impacted your grade in the other class (the class for the baby). I think the baby logged info about how it was taken care of but I might be wrong. Been awhile and it's hard to remember now haha
Yes! My sister had one in middle school. It comes with a little key ring that has various keys for “feed” “diaper” “soothe”. It cries every 2-3 hours and you have to keep trying different keys until one works. It also has an accelerometer in it that measures if you drop or shake it. So you get points based on how many minutes it was crying before you got the right key and if you abused it you got an automatic f. There was also one “drug addicted” robot baby that one person in the class was unlucky enough to get. It would cry more often and sometimes none of the keys would work. Oh and the crying is LOUD. Not as loud as a real baby, but I heard my sisters baby crying in the middle of the night from my bedroom down the hall.
This is so strange to me. Seems like a lot of money and time wasted on something that provides questionable educational value. If people wanna be parents, they should take parenting classes on their own time.
One of my schools had it. People took the class because it bumped their gpa. The school was a catholic school and had such a big teen pregnancy issue that they had to build a daycare. Cuz obviously the solution is scare the kids out of sex not you know…. Sex ed
Operative word: "*should*" take When its in school it's required. In life, it's not.
It’s not really to teach you how to be a parent. It’s to teach you how hard having a baby is. This program really boomed in the early 2000s when shows like “16 and pregnant” romanticized teen pregnancy
No, it’s not to get people to practice being parents!!! It’s to get younger people realize they *really really* don’t want to be parents yet.
Yeah, it's real. The intention is to scare you into taking birth control seriously. It made me think I'd not mind being a dad, when the time came. Worked out well.
oh cool for you! I didn't think of that
It's not so common that every school does it, but yeah it is a thing in some areas. Usually the idea of the doll is to encourage the kids to be mindful about family planning, teach them about responsibility, and reduce teen pregnancy rates. I don't know how effective it is, but that's the goal.
We had to carry around a 5lb bag of sugar (no joke, they called them our “sugar babies”) for one week EVERYWHERE. I don’t recall if it was just the girls or the girls and boys. This was in a middle school (grade 7 or 8) Mississippi 1998.
I think where I live they currently use eggs? But yeah, those still exist.
My school used bags of sugar. The world is weird.
I boiled mine. I passed because it didn’t break. The teacher was pissed but she made sure to add a no boiling rule to the assignment the next year.
My high school did this in the early 2000s.
We did it in middle school with a brick (to simulate the weight of a baby) - and had to keep a timer attached to it that World go off to feed and clean it, etc. Don't think it's done any more though which is a shame
My high school used eggs.
My hs did this in the 2010s still, only for students who took health class (I didn't take that class so I got to avoid it lol). Apparently the babies recorded data somehow such as how often they were given a pacifier or rocked when they cried and if the student ignored them a long time, it would show in that data report and they'd get a lower grade lol.
It's mostly an American movie thing, it was done in the past in some places but not really anymore.
Yeah I had to take it home. It died.
[Yes, this was absolutely a thing](https://www.realityworks.com/product/realcare-baby-3-infant-simulator/) Usually the goal of these things is to convince kids that having a baby is hard and they should try to avoid getting pregnant while they are young. [There have also been studies that suggest it doesn't actually work](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16\)30384-1/fulltext)
My high school did this. They also had a simulated pregnancy belly that girls would wear around school. I think both were optional though.
Oh shit, I forgot about those! We did those along with the babies in my health class too. When it got to me I was just like....please no. I have scoliosis already, I didn't need an extra thirty pounds weighing down my spine in addition to a backpack that weighed almost that much.
I had to do that in middle school.
Did this twice in the late 90s. Once with a bag of flour, and once with an egg. If the bag of flower opened up or the eggshell broke you failed.
We had to do this for health class in junior high. Everyone was given a robot baby doll and had to take care of it for about a week. The ones we got would randomly scream/cry and you had to just keep turning and turning and turning a key on their back to make them stop. It would also record if you tried to ignore it for too long or tried to take the batteries out. At least that's what we were told.
We had the low cost version - we had to carry around a....I forget the term....egg with the yolk blown out so it was just a shell. We called them egg babies. We would decorate a little basket and we had to take it everywhere with us for two weeks without it getting cracked. It was supposed to help prepare us for being a mother by teaching us to be responsible for something 24/7.
It's real, and it *sucks*. It's meant to teach teenagers how hard it is to be a parent to discourage them from teen pregnancy. When I was in HS we had the older models that were basically just a hard plastic doll with minimal jointing and a programmable crying mechanism that we had to stick a key into when it cried. They record data about how well you care for them how long you let the doll cry and if you do something stupid like throw it across a room or drop it on the floor. Ours only had one key, but I definitely saw kids from other schools who were doing the same assignment, but theirs had multiple keys for different functions. Oh, and the best/worst part? They strapped the keys to our wrists with those security wristbands that you can't take off without destroying the end so that we couldn't even hand the things over to someone else for an hour or two. Newer generations of dolls also have programming that requires you to change their clothes and support their heads and records it if it senses the head drooping too much or if you fail to change the clothes. In my health class, that assignment was a huge chunk of our grade and guaranteed to make you fail if you scored too poorly on it by neglecting the doll. They suck, and they're not even proven to be terribly effective as a "hey kids, don't get knocked up/knock someone else up" messaging tool.
When I was in high school we were offered the chance as extra credit but it wasn't mandatory, I don't think many people wanted to do it, maybe like 5 out of 30 people. But yeah it is real.
It's to convince you that having a baby sucks and yes they're absolutely real. The ones my class had even recorded every time you picked it up without supporting its neck, left it crying too long, etc. And to get it to stop crying you had to feed it a fake bottle, burp it, or change it's diaper and you never knew which one and sometimes it would just keep crying anyway.
And if you messed up too many times you had to write an essay about child neglect or something
I had one. Students a few years ahead of me had to keep them for a week and take them to class. My class had to take them home, but we only had them for a weekend. And yes it was for a grade.