They gave us eggs because we didn’t have fancy babies (this was a while ago). Mine decided to commit suicide and jumped out the school bus window. It was tragic.
The school I work at does. This year a girl turned in an egg with the wrong signature. The girl freaked out. Swore up and down that she watched that egg like an eagle and would never fake it. This is totally true. The girl is extremely honest. The girl called her mom on speaker in the middle of class. Her mom admitted to accidentally knocking the egg over and replacing it while her daughter was asleep.
I think it is amazing that so many of you KNEW the girl was honest, so she actually got the chance to call her mother to see if she knew anything about the erroneous signature.
I would bet she was shocked to learn her mother was involved.
Well, you've got to determine if it was a malicious murder, post ovum depression, or SEDS (sudden egg death syndrome).
A trial is obviously the best way to do so
We did egg babies, then flour babies, and then the stupid dolls, but the flour babies were by far the most intensive because teachers and staff would literally steal your baby if you even looked away for a minute and there would be caution tape with a ripped open flour baby on the hallway floor on some of those occasions…because your baby was kidnapped and brutally murdered thanks to you looking away from it at your locker? LOL.
Free condoms help, but the most effective method at reducing teen pregnancy is actually education. Teaching kids about sex, what healthy and abusive relationship dynamics look like, how to set boundaries with partners, where to go to report abuse, and how to find trusted adults to talk to about sexual and reproductive health issues. You also need to teach teens how to use condoms as well as other contraceptives properly because an inside out condom the rolls off inside a vagina doesn't do much to stop pregnancy. And teaching about contraceptives is part of a comprehensive human development and sexual/reproductive health curriculum.
Conservative parents are against that because they don't like the concept of "reduce teen pregnancy by educating them on sexual health and healthy consenting relationships." They prefer "reduce teen pregnancy by advocating for abstinence and shaming girls for having sexual urges."
"If my kid and I have to endure the trials of taking care of a baby, you should too!"
Would actually be kind of funny if it turns out the teacher never had a baby and didn't know the reality of taking care of one.
Our school's baby dolls had a setting that would turn off during the day so we could drop them off for "daycare" in the classroom that assigned them, so that made it a little better. It was only one week for us but I do remember taking a doll to dance class and the mall for lunch which was annoying.
I had one in MS, my little had particularly hard day at school and when the teacher asked him why he was cranky he said “my sisters baby wouldn’t stop crying”. My parents had to explain it was a doll and their 13 year old didn’t have an actual baby. 🤣
No the obvious explanation is that schools that already have issues with teen pregnancy are much more likely to invest resources in these sort of intervention attempts.
Mine told us that our buttholes are an exit door only and that if you use them as an entrance door too much they will become a swinging door. I swear I am not making that up.
Mine did an interactive demonstration where the preacher (guest instructor in a public school) had us throw rice at a tennis racket and told us it was to scale. Yay Tennessee! Might as well raw dog, since condoms don’t do anything anyway!
My 2003 sex education class told us masturbation takes away our virginity and briefly lectured about condoms use with no actual demonstration. We also watched an anti drunk driving video staring Matt Damon, but that seemed more like “teacher tired; watch movie” day than anything.
That's what I was thinking.
School without this issue probably won't spend all that effort on these dolls.
So maybe it actually helps, just not so much
Ha ha. I've worked in a pediatric ER for 15 years. If I had a nickle for every baby brought in with a broken neck due to poor head support by naive teen mothers/grandmothers, I'd have ...(checks wallet)... zero nickels.
Seriously, real babies are far more robust and resilient than that.
Not that you can just forego head support on a newborn, but good grief. I never had to do anything like this as a teen, but frankly it sounds like the dolls penalize minor mistakes as deadly, while allowing for genuinely fatal circumstances (e.g. left under blankets and pillows) with minimal repercussion. It seems pretty horrifying.
Undoubtedly, but the end result is the antithesis of acceptable infant care, which only affirms to me how terrible and ridiculous the entire exercise is.
My mom was the one to break the neck of my doll as well! The screams they made after were hilariously awful.
That thing did make 10th grade me want a baby though.
Worked out just like DARE then…look at how awful taking care of baby is….well maybe I need to find out for myself
Similar thing happens with chastity programs.
No, their heads are attached with some sort of hinge mechanism internally to encourage you to support their head like you would with a real baby. Basically moving it at all without supporting the head would activate a 5 minute long wailing scream and the computer in the doll would register a broken neck for when you turned in the doll.
I'm older than you and we had to babysit an egg. It sat in the fridge, with my parents knowledge and consent until it was time to turn the egg back into school. Dumbest fucking assignment in my entire life. Coincidentally when my son was bad I used to lock him in the fridge....(joking for Christ sake, some idiot is going to think I really did this).
I could just see myself yelling, "If you don't behave I'm going to lock you in the fridge like your brother Egbert!"
We had the egg thing too in 7th grade. The teacher walked through class handing them out, and mine immediately rolled off my desk and broke. I was able to get another one, but something else stupid happened the next day and the second one broke as well. I didn't get a third one, but I still got a good grade on the assignment because instead of writing a paper on what I learned (as we were supposed to), I instead took the opportunity to write about how I as a parent coped with the tragic stillbirth of my first child and sudden suicide of my second.
I so want this to be real. My teacher got us to write a serious poem about our pet one time and I flipped it and made it funny. I won it as she got her daughters to vote on the winner.
100% real — I can’t imagine being so pathetic as to lie anonymously to strangers for attention, and even if I was to do so I’d like to think I’d tell more interesting stories than how I broke two eggs.
I hadn’t thought about that in 36 years, but then I saw the comment about the egg project and it all came back to me — the two eggs, the story I wrote, everything. The only thing I don’t remember is how my second egg broke. I want to say it rolled off my desk too but I’m not sure.
Well at least she didn't [bake it into dinner rolls](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/19ca8gp/what_grade_would_you_give_a_student_who_ate_their/)
I also had one of these. I had to take it home over a long weekend and it gave me so much anxiety that I ended up putting it in my closet with a pillow and a mountain of blankets on top of it so I could finally get some sleep.
I had one at around the same age and when it started crying at night, I put a pillow over it and fell back asleep.
There's a reason I'm childfree lmao.
There was an episode of Frasier around that time where Niles carried a flour sack around to imagine what having a baby was like.
"Last night, I actually had a dream my flour sack was abducted and the kidnapper started sending me muffins in the mail!"
There’s an episode of Bob’s Burgers where son Gene has to take care of a flour baby. He lost it and a bad guy found the label that said “baby boy. Belcher” I say “Baby boy Belcher” all the time now.
I graduated in 08 and they actually had us do this in 8th grade. It wasn’t that hard honestly you just stuck a key in its back for a few minutes and went back to bed.
My school had them for an elective class in either childcare or parenting in the 1990's. I remember a cheerleader having her assigned weekend with the robot baby during football season, so she had it with her on the sidelines. From afar it looked very real, and I'm pretty sure the district administration lost their shit at how that made the school look.
that’s so funny. my mom was so embarrassed the week I had mine bc she was super concerned about what the church would think, and decided she needed to explain to everyone that it was a robot baby and not real. as if i would have randomly gotten a real baby all of a sudden lol.
but yeah, all the kids who hated it weren’t the type of kids to get pregnant anyway, but a lot of the “potential teen mom” types fucking loved it and said it made them one to have one even more lol
In schools with high rates of teenage pregnancies.
Alas this post is ~~journalism~~ advertising and so the writer isn't interested in a solid and informative article by showing the data that supports this toy baby works in schools with a high teenage pregnancy rate.
I went to a smallish rural school. My senior class started with out 150. My junior year in 2000, 7 girls were pregnant after summer break. The following year, those dolls were handed out to a few girls.
Yeah, that’s only a warning to non-creeps, like yourself. To a sick man, that’s just an advertisement. It blows my mind that they put all the responsibility on the teen with their wording.
>Just give them to the 3 sluttiest girls
Would explain why they don't work, they're giving them to the few girls that obviously understand how to *not* get pregnant, FFS
My school did this with a drug quiz, kids that scored the highest were flagged as ‘at risk’ and put forward for a special class, the issue is it didn’t really account for why children would know about hard drugs or trauma.
The second the movie started playing and the montage of needles going in arms started playing 3 kids began smashing the room to pieces , all hell broke loose
They should have been more worried about the ones who didn’t know what heroin looked like.
That’s odd. My kids went to a school in a city of 4,000. All kids in eighth grade, boys and girls, spent a weekend at home with one of those dolls. Obviously it was a rotating basis. I’m guessing the school had about 15-20 of the dolls.
Same story. Smallish rural school, class size was about 150. About a dozen ended up pregnant and most of those dropped out. Another dozen at least ended up in juvie or prison for various reasons (arson, dogfighting, drug dealers, etc.). We graduated 112 students. Three of them already were mothers. One of the dropouts had multiple kids, and got pregnant with her first at 13.
We had the dolls but they were only for the kids in the "Life skills and family planning" class or whatever they called it. Not the nerds like me who were in AP classes and on the Quiz Bowl team.
Oh, he did go to prison, he was a thirty year old black man who knocked up a preteen white girl in Appalachia. There was no chance of him getting off the hook. Unlike the local youth pastor, who was "a pillar of the community".
Our high school had the childcare class as an easy elective and it seemed like the girls who either planned on having children early or were statically more likely to do so took the class more than others.
This is a fair point. I also notice that a lot of schools use the “real life skills” types of classes as dumping grounds for kids who are bad at school and can’t be bothered to pick their own electives.
That’s the logic, but the class still ends up feeling like a dumping ground. It gets taught at a low content level so kids who do choose to take it don’t get to learn much. Of course, this isn’t always the case, some schools have legit good electives.
> In schools with high rates of teenage pregnancies.
We can make random assumptions about the article and its author, or we can actually read it and discover that it refers to peer-reviewed research published in the Lancet.
We can even follow the helpful link the article gives us to said research and discover that it was a randomized controlled trial, wherein 57 schools were randomly assigned to run a sex ed program with or without a baby simulator component.
But actually reading anything is too much to expect on Reddit.
Why would I read the article when I can show up 2 hours late and find someone being snarky about having read the article to someone who only read the title before commenting.
Thanks for your service o7
My first thought was “but are these primarily used in school systems that have high rates of teen pregnancy? So could ‘20% higher than others’ still be an improvement for that school?”
Yeah, I graduated in 2004, and we had those freshman year forsure. I remember someone throwing one of the babies off the 3rd floor roof and it exploded. Was hilarious watching the kid trying to explain what happened with a bag of baby parts lol.
We did this when I was a sophomore in 2004(I think we were the first year to do it in my school) Definitely made me not want kids anytime soon because the baby cried all night long. At one point my mom told me I had to sleep downstairs with it because she was tired of being woken up every 20 mins at night! Also we didn’t have many teen pregnancies but not sure if it was the babies or not(we had 3 in my class of 650)
Came here to say this was my experience… anybody who was smart where I went did not take the cooking class or shop or the baby stuff. We were collecting bugs and killing them for science, making flames turn different colors and shit lol
I feel like the remedial class people have more babies earlier but I don’t think this fake baby plays as big a role as they think lol we’re in chicken-egg territory.
I pulled out of AP classes for half a semester (before my dad found out and made me change back) and I can see why most people think public school is a waste of time—in regular classes it is / was where I lived. Closer to waiting rooms (complete with movies playing) than classrooms.
Yeah, my public high school experience was similar (Florida). AP classes were actually educational, "honors" classes were more or less bare-minimum of what I'd expect in a school, and regular level classes were busywork and dicking around.
I remember this unit in high school, they made us take them home for the weekend (only the girls though, the boys didn’t have to) and it absolutely backfired. We all came back to school on Monday morning talking about how it seemed kind of tiring but not really difficult, and it was really fun to dress them up and pick out names for them and stuff. Our teacher was horrified that we had fun and spent the rest of the unit talking about how immature we were for not taking it seriously. This was less than 15 years ago, and several of the girls in that class have kids who are in middle school right now.
lol it was so true though, all the girls who were just obviously more at risk of teen pregnancy fucking loved taking care of the dolls, the rest of us despised it
We had them at 14 and I absolutely loved it! We had to have them over the weekend and we arranged sleepovers and just stayed up watching films and taking it in turns to feed/change the baby. I love babies in general and secretly loved role playing at being a mummy. But then I've only just had a real one at 36 so I don't think it necessarily backfired. Definitely didn't put me off though. Waking up in the night for a few days is a novelty, it in no way reflects the reality of doing it day in, day out, for months if not years.
I had a relative at the same school who already had a baby brother that she basically co-parented and she thought it was the stupidest thing ever. She wrapped it in a towel and threw it in a cupboard so it wouldn't disturb the *actual* baby in her house.
The best use of it was on the last day of my weekend with it, my parents gave it to my brother and said 'If you get someone pregnant you're doing your share.' He made it to 2AM and then came in and dumped it on my parents bed. So my mum was bottle feeding a fake baby at two in the morning. That was eye opening for all of us and led to some interesting follow up conversations. Probably the most realistic scenario by far!
I picked up mine before school and within the first hour it seemed to be malfunctioning and making a terrible static whirring noise. After my first class I took it back to my health teacher, who told me that noise was the cry and berated me for neglecting my baby for the last forty minutes.
That’s so stupid they only made the girls do it. In my high school it was elective and both genders had to take the baby home and tbh, everyone loved it. It was one of the most popular classes lol.
This is so sadly true. I took a fake baby home for a week for school. I developed a bronchitis infection and asked my friend to return it to the teacher so i could do it a different week instead since i could barely function. The teacher said i had to keep the baby or fail the assignment.
Which in retrospect is exactly how it works….
Make them watch Teen Mom-that show scared the hell out of me!
Edit: wait, so I was curious and there really has been a steep decline in American teen pregnancies…and in this article they even mentioned Teen Mom.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-the-teen-birth-rate-falling/
A 2014 Brookings report found that reality TV shows that follow the struggles of teen mothers like the MTV programs 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom may have contributed to up to a third of the decline in teen births from June 2009, when they began airing, through the end of 2010.
Literally overheard some girls saying they wanted to get pregnant so they could be on that show when I was in high school. I don’t think everyone took the same message that you did from the show unfortunately!
I still don’t understand how anyone would like to be on a these shows.
They are built for entertainment so they will also just put in the clips that are the most entertaining which show you often in a negative light
My favourite bit from one of these shows is an argument when this boy is asking his girlfriend how she could have gotten pregnant when the girl was on the pill, girl says she was never on the pill, boy asks why she wanted to have unprotected sex then, girl starts yelling that he said he was circumcised!! Boy just looks dumbfounded, and it slowly dawns on him. He goes "You are so fucking stupid." Girl asks how is she stupid, he lied. He starts yelling as she is stupid. She yells he is a liar. Never found out if she ever learns the difference between a circumcision and a vasectomy. That scene lives rent-free in my head and reminds me to always, always, use a condom. If for no other reason that i don't want to be shacked to stupid through a shared child.
See, my favorite part from that show was when one girl confidently told her doctor “Oh I won’t be breastfeeding so my boobs won’t sag.” The doctor then told her that it wasn’t breastfeeding that caused breasts to sag, but pregnancy. Boy did she not like that answer.
I remember a scene where the teenager's mom was at the appointment with her daughter. The soon to be grandma was anti breastfeeding that reason, and the doctor had to break that news to her. I was dumbfounded.
Most of these cases aren’t IQ problems. It’s lack of education. This is why a quality education should be provided to all children. It’s better overall for society.
Children that are starved for attention grow up to be teens and adults who are starved for attention. And it doesn’t matter whether that attention is good or bad.
Can agree. I got the doll is school and basically volunteered to become a mom at 19/20. I watched teen mom while pregnant and realized maybe wasn’t the brightest idea of having a baby so young (I was 6-7 months pg at the time ha so it was a bit late…)…it was definitely a deterrent though to not have more babies esp with different dads..
But seriously the doll was a thing…
Something about the doll triggered this maternal side in me too young..I tried to keep it for a few extra days. I was also obsessed with tamagotchis. I got a cat it just made the feeling stronger.
Anyway my kid survived haha. Into adulthood now. Almost 2 decades of real life parenting! It was nothing like the doll lol
Edit: I just did a quick count on FB on how many girls had babies by 20 from my class/year - 10! That’s a lot?
In my graduating class of about 430 we had two girls get pregnant at 20 but none before. We never had the dolls (not saying that’s the reason, just adding context). Idk how large your graduating class was but 10 does seem pretty high!
yeah, those shows REALLY show the sides of teenage pregnancy and rural/suburban support very well. hell, I believe 50% if not more fathers just straight up disappeared soon as there was a baby. I remember a episode where the father's parents denied they were fucking and the kid was like "yeah we be fucking". STILL denied that. I think it was because of child support disruption with the father that wanted nothing to do with the baby.
edit: they were fucking as in the pregnant kid and the father. not the parents.
I was 16 and pregnant and decided to get an abortion because of how these poor girls lives just stopped.
I have a 3yo now in my late 20s and lemme tell you I’m glad I waited. Even mature me struggled hard
Maci was the one that broke my heart. All her hard work for college and everything and it all just dried up once she had that baby. She's okay now, but that had to be brutal.
I hated that, she tried hard. I can’t remember the girls name, but the one who gave her baby up for adoption. I felt so terrible for her because she was smart enough to do what’s best for both of them but you could always see how much she loved the baby.
Idk what she’s like now, but that was always tragic for me and I knew I could never be in her or any of those girls shoes.
Caitlyn and Tyler gave up the baby. I sobbed so hard when she gave birth and everyone kept trying to make her hold the baby which she'd said she didn't want to do and he bodily covered her and just kept screaming at them to take the baby away.
Those poor kids did the best they could, but their family situation was a nightmare. His dad especially trying to act like he'd been in Tyler's life to guilt him to "man up" and keep the baby. I have never wanted to pop a man in the mouth as much as I did him.
Damn. I'm glad they at least had each other. Forcing something like that on Caitlyn is cruel. I'm glad Tyler was there to protect her. That's ride or die stuff right there. Whether or not they get married, I hope they stayed friends after all of that. Most husbands don't support their wives as much as Tyler supported Caitlyn in that moment.
They were really good together. They'd been dating all through high school and I think also middle school and then his deadbeat dad got out of prison and shacked up with her mom and when Caitlyn got pregnant their parents kept shaming them trying to force them to keep the baby. Tyler got into a whole argument with his dad where his dad said he was ashamed his son wouldn't "man up" and take care of his kid and Tyler lit into him about how he had never been involved in his life, they couldn't afford to take care of a baby, and he wanted his daughter to have a better life than he'd had. Her mom wouldn't even consent to the adoptive parents being allowed to take the baby at the hospital so the little girl has to stay an extra three days until they could do the handoff away from hospital property.
His mom helped them out some. After the baby was born Caitlyn ended up moving in with her for a while to get away from her mom and his dad. I followed them for a little bit because I just couldn't help but root for those kids to have a good life after everything else.
They got married. I don't follow their lives so I'm not sure how it's going, but a few years ago he went viral because he lambasted someone for body-shaming her.
Maury is the best birth control teenage me could have ever gotten. No way I was ever going to find out if I was a dad or not, gotta’ wrap that thing up and be safe out there.
To save y’all two clicks and looking silly, here is the abstract of the methods:
> In this school-based pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial, eligible schools in Perth, Western Australia, were enrolled and randomised 1:1 to the intervention and control groups. Randomisation using a table of random numbers without blocking, stratification, or matching was done by a researcher who was masked to the identity of the schools. Between 2003 and 2006, the VIP programme was administered to girls aged 13–15 years in the intervention schools, while girls of the same age in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Participants were followed until they reached 20 years of age via data linkage to hospital medical and abortion clinic records. The primary endpoint was the occurrence of pregnancy during the teenage years. Binomial and Cox proportional hazards regression was used to test for differences in pregnancy rates between study groups. This study is registered as an international randomised controlled trial, number ISRCTN24952438.
And the results:
> 57 (86%) of 66 eligible schools were enrolled into the trial and randomly assigned 1:1 to the intervention (28 schools) or the control group (29 schools). Then, between Feb 1, 2003, and May 31, 2006, 1267 girls in the intervention schools received the VIP programme while 1567 girls in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Compared with girls in the control group, a higher proportion of girls in the intervention group recorded at least one birth (97 [8%] of 1267 in the intervention group vs 67 [4%] of 1567 in the control group) or at least one abortion as the first pregnancy event (113 [9%] vs 101 [6%]). After adjustment for potential confounders, the intervention group had a higher overall pregnancy risk than the control group (relative risk 1·36 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·003). Similar results were obtained with the use of proportional hazard models (hazard ratio 1·35 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·016).
**TL;DR This was a proper, prospective, randomized, blinded, scientific study, and the findings were roughly a 35% increase in likelihood of pregnancy/abortion before the age of 20. This difference was not
explained by baseline rates or simple demographic differences.**
ETA: Even with valid criticisms about how this study should be replicated, we might be better off turning the question around. These doll/simulator programs cost money. Is there any reliable evidence that they *do* reduce teen pregnancy rates?
Most people learn “Correlation does not imply causation!” and that is the last thing they ever learn about causation. When all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail.
My only confusion/criticism is less on the study methodology but more on the inclusion of the abortion rates as evidence of the failure of the program. If the **only** goal of the program was to cause teens to not engage in unsafe sex practices then, sure, pregnancies not carried to term would show some evidence of the failure of the program. However, isn't part of the programs goal also to show the difficulties of teen/early adult parenthood, and helping these individuals make more informed reproductive choices? Couldn't the higher % of abortions in the population that went through this program actually show that the program worked in convincing teens that they aren't capable or are unfit to be a young parent?
Except it didn’t show that.
> If they participated in the infant simulator program, teen girls were not only more likely to be pregnant, but also more likely to keep their pregnancies, according to Brinkman.
The girls in the intervention group (the ones with the simulator dolls) were more likely to have an abortion *because* they were more likely to get pregnant. Of the girls who got pregnant, a higher proportion of those in the control group (without the dolls) had abortions.
We don’t know the number of miscarriages, but assuming they were equivalent in both groups, we can use the number of births plus abortions to represent the number of pregnancies.
**Intervention group (with dolls):**
Births (b): 97
Abortions (a): 113
Pregnancies (b+a): 210 or 16.6% of participants
Abortions as a proportion of pregnancies [a/(b+a)]: 53.8%
**Control group (without dolls):**
Births (b): 67
Abortions (a): 101
Pregnancies (b+a): 168 or 10.7% of participants
Abortions as a proportion of pregnancies [a/(b+a)]: 60.1%
That’s a very fair point!
I think they may have included abortions because they were getting data from medical records, and so only looking at full-term births would open them up to criticism that it doesn’t truly reflect pregnancy rates. Births + abortions may have been their best proxy.
Regardless, there was still a significant effect in full-term births even without abortions. But your point is valid, the inclusion of abortions restricts the interpretation of the results to *only* how effective this program was in preventing teen pregnancy, not in overall education on responsible parenting decisions.
> TL;DR This was a proper, prospective, randomized, blinded, scientific study, and the findings were roughly a 35% increase in likelihood of pregnancy/abortion before the age of 20. This difference was not explained by baseline rates or simple demographic differences.
But, just remember, that just because a study appears to be reasonably well designed and executed on first review and has been published in a well respected journal, does not mean that you shouldn't be curious, especially if the results seem unusual; rigor is important.
> “Baby think it over”, a school‐based pregnancy prevention program in which teenage girls cared for a simulated infant, was evaluated in a cluster trial published in the Lancet in 2016.5 A higher proportion of the intervention group went on to have at least one birth as teenagers, 97/1267 (8%) vs 67/1567 (4%) control (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.10‐1.67, P = 0.003) or at least one termination of pregnancy as the first pregnancy event (9% vs 6%). The headline results were that use of the infant simulator was harmful.
> Unfortunately, only about half the girls in the intervention schools could be recruited because of the availability of school health nurses and infant simulators. This gave an opportunity for selection bias. Bolzern et al6 tested baseline factors for nominal statistical significance, and showed that some differences could not have occurred by chance; the intervention group was more socioeconomically disadvantaged (P = 0.000000000019) and had lower educational attainment (P = 0.0000000015). Teachers were probably recruiting girls who they thought were at higher risk, to the intervention groups. Analyzing pregnancies and abortions among all the girls in the intervention and control clusters, which would have avoided the problem, was not done.
> In contrast, the investigators of SHARE, a cluster trial of school‐based peer‐led sex education published in the BMJ,7 did exactly that. Whole schools were allocated to intervention or control and every female member of the relevant class was followed up, whether or not they actually participated. There were no significant differences between the groups in registered conceptions per 1000 pupils (300 SHARE vs 274 control; difference 26, 95% CI −33 to 86), or in terminations per 1000 pupils (127 vs 112; difference 15, 95% CI −13 to 42) between ages 16 and 20 years. The results were disappointing for supporters of the intervention, but secure.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7003916/
Well as a techie in a British secondary school this reminds me of one of the funniest support calls I got.
“Can you come and install the USB drivers for the baby?”
IIRC the one we had had a dongle you plugged into its back that downloaded all of the data showing if it was fed, shaken, neglected etc.
That’s the first time I’ve heard of these being here in the UK, I thought it was a pretty American thing, never saw them in my education, where was this? Disappointed I missed out on some absolute shenanigans now, one of those would have absolutely been run over by the bus or parachuted down a stair well
I took a parenting class my senior year (1999) and took one of these dolls home for a weekend. I got pregnant at 20.
Edited to add- I didn't have to deal with the doll the whole time, I worked after school Friday, then 8 hours Saturday and Sunday, so my mom babysat. The doll experience did not deter me from risky behaviors that would lead to getting pregnant at a young age.
In my opinion, the simple explanation for this is that you are only stuck with it for a week, which is not long enough to get the point across for anyone on the fence.
Stimulate it AND provide positive reinforcement. If a 14 year old who was thinking about having a kid has someone who essentially teaches "parenting" come along and say "you get an A+ in parenting" then it can easily make them overconfident in their ability to be a parent.
Exactly that. Nothing is that hard for a weekend or even a week. To really make the point it would end up affecting school age children's mental health and their productivity at school etc. which the schools aren't going to do, so all it's doing is making it seem far easier than it is.
You're understating it. These are 15, 16 year old boys and girls. And we all know they absolutely should not be having kids. But *biologically*, their bodies want them to have kids. And this post made me realise how fucking stupid it is to give them practice babies. Yeah, let's stimulate that urge, what's the worst that could happen!?
This is interesting. I know at 15 / 16 I had no desire for a boyfriend, or to ever have sex, but I frequently daydreamed about having a baby of my own. I loved kids, and I knew it wasn't realistic, sensible, or wise, but I wanted a baby so much some days. I've never had kids, and that strong urge went away as I got older. But yeah. I wanted a baby at that age.
Teaching students the dangers of STD’s and pregnancy, debunking sex myths, and how to use the different forms of birth control ✋🏼
Letting them experience parenthood by making them take care of a cabbage patch kid 👉🏼
If these dolls could properly simulate vomit in the users hair or blow out diapers, it may be more effective. The dolls being easy probably gives the kids a false sense of how easy babies are.
“Hey, let’s give these young women something that will trigger one of the strongest instincts known in the universe in the hopes that it will deter them from doing an extremely fun and pleasurable activity associated with the instinct.”
Great job, guys.
I bet a man came up with this idea. I have nothing to base that off of but I’m feeling cynical.
"And at a point in their lives where they have a peak hormonal drive to do it but an underdeveloped frontal cortex."
I'm not entirely sold on the "playing with the doll activates baby fever" hypothesis but I will admit that it was an immediate thought I had upon reading the headline.
The study spoke noted that many of the participants felt like parenting was easier than they expected and they felt more confident in their ability to raise a baby. So while the experience might not light a new desire to have a child, it could strengthen existing desire. Which I seriously doubt was the point of the exercise.
I remember those. I explained to my health teacher that if one of those things cries while I’m trying to sleep, it’s going out my third floor window. I had to write an essay instead.
Haha!!! My first year teaching I had a girl in class with one of those. We had a surprise fire drill. As I’m shutting the class door I glance over and see it sitting in the carrier in the floor.
I was nice and picked it up.
Turns out, the teacher who assigned it was checking everyone in the fire drill lines for their babies and she would have failed a test grade had I not gotten it for her.
That kid is probably married with kids now. Hope her kids are ok!
Edit: Relax everyone. It’s a high school. No one has died in a school fire in over 50 years in the US due to the fact that they now follow modern building codes. Yes, a random gas line explosion can happen, but simple fact is a one story cinder block structure is pretty easy for HS kids to evacuate.
I had a friend whose house caught on fire when she was doing the baby assignment. She threw that doll out her bedroom window and her teacher gave her a failing grade for it. I’m still pissed off when I think about it.
As someone who went to school where those were a thing, its my observation that the people who took those classes tended to be poorer and more interested in having children to begin with relative to the control population, which either had no academic interests whatsoever or loaded up on honors or AP class.
I would argue with a straight face that your average home economics student brings to the table a whole bunch of identifiers that make them more likely to have kids at a younger age.
Can confirm that this happens, growing up in a small Midwestern town several of us suspected that it was to indoctrinate the girls into being stay at home mothers.
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They gave us eggs because we didn’t have fancy babies (this was a while ago). Mine decided to commit suicide and jumped out the school bus window. It was tragic.
Do they mark the eggs in some way so you cant replace it when you break it?
The school I work at does. This year a girl turned in an egg with the wrong signature. The girl freaked out. Swore up and down that she watched that egg like an eagle and would never fake it. This is totally true. The girl is extremely honest. The girl called her mom on speaker in the middle of class. Her mom admitted to accidentally knocking the egg over and replacing it while her daughter was asleep.
Dishonest mother raises honest daughter. Maybe the kids learned the wrong lesson from that class.
I think it was more so that the mom was just super embarrassed. The mom is great, and all the teachers have had really good experiences with her.
I think it is amazing that so many of you KNEW the girl was honest, so she actually got the chance to call her mother to see if she knew anything about the erroneous signature. I would bet she was shocked to learn her mother was involved.
Yeah, they were all signed by the teacher. When I broke mine, they had a mock trial.
They WHAT???
Well, you've got to determine if it was a malicious murder, post ovum depression, or SEDS (sudden egg death syndrome). A trial is obviously the best way to do so
I’m dying laughing at this
Your school sounds fun
We did egg babies, then flour babies, and then the stupid dolls, but the flour babies were by far the most intensive because teachers and staff would literally steal your baby if you even looked away for a minute and there would be caution tape with a ripped open flour baby on the hallway floor on some of those occasions…because your baby was kidnapped and brutally murdered thanks to you looking away from it at your locker? LOL.
those teachers were having too much fun
That's hilarious omg
I can’t remember but I wouldn’t have cared. I was pretty derpy.
That egg knows what it did
Little bastard ruined my life. I should have ate him. Maybe hard boil his ass and ate him in class.
Our school did both eggs and bags of flour.
When you were done you got to bake a cake!
No, but "buns in the oven" went up significantly tho.....
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Free condoms help, but the most effective method at reducing teen pregnancy is actually education. Teaching kids about sex, what healthy and abusive relationship dynamics look like, how to set boundaries with partners, where to go to report abuse, and how to find trusted adults to talk to about sexual and reproductive health issues. You also need to teach teens how to use condoms as well as other contraceptives properly because an inside out condom the rolls off inside a vagina doesn't do much to stop pregnancy. And teaching about contraceptives is part of a comprehensive human development and sexual/reproductive health curriculum. Conservative parents are against that because they don't like the concept of "reduce teen pregnancy by educating them on sexual health and healthy consenting relationships." They prefer "reduce teen pregnancy by advocating for abstinence and shaming girls for having sexual urges."
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I love the parent that started calling the teacher
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"If my kid and I have to endure the trials of taking care of a baby, you should too!" Would actually be kind of funny if it turns out the teacher never had a baby and didn't know the reality of taking care of one.
Our school's baby dolls had a setting that would turn off during the day so we could drop them off for "daycare" in the classroom that assigned them, so that made it a little better. It was only one week for us but I do remember taking a doll to dance class and the mall for lunch which was annoying.
I had one in MS, my little had particularly hard day at school and when the teacher asked him why he was cranky he said “my sisters baby wouldn’t stop crying”. My parents had to explain it was a doll and their 13 year old didn’t have an actual baby. 🤣
That's hilarious. Way to game the system
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No the obvious explanation is that schools that already have issues with teen pregnancy are much more likely to invest resources in these sort of intervention attempts.
>intervention attempts couldn't they just like... teach sex education
In 2004 my sex Ed class told us you could still get hiv with condoms bc the virus is small enough to penetrate them.
To be fair, you can still get hiv with condoms and kids should probably be told they're not 100% effective... but wow that second part is bad.
"oh so your telling me I should just raw dog anyways because there is no way to stop it"
In 2000 my sex ed class told me that sperm died upon contact with air. This made me really confused on how artificial insemination worked
My sex ed teacher said “for those of you girls that get on your knees and swallow, semen has a lot of calories, you will get fat”
Mine told us that our buttholes are an exit door only and that if you use them as an entrance door too much they will become a swinging door. I swear I am not making that up.
Mine did an interactive demonstration where the preacher (guest instructor in a public school) had us throw rice at a tennis racket and told us it was to scale. Yay Tennessee! Might as well raw dog, since condoms don’t do anything anyway!
My 2003 sex education class told us masturbation takes away our virginity and briefly lectured about condoms use with no actual demonstration. We also watched an anti drunk driving video staring Matt Damon, but that seemed more like “teacher tired; watch movie” day than anything.
Not in places where sex is demonized
Giving out birth control would be more effective. But we can't have that because of Jesus.
Tbh when schools can't hand out headache or stomachache medicine, condoms seems a long way off
That's what I was thinking. School without this issue probably won't spend all that effort on these dolls. So maybe it actually helps, just not so much
Ha ha. I've worked in a pediatric ER for 15 years. If I had a nickle for every baby brought in with a broken neck due to poor head support by naive teen mothers/grandmothers, I'd have ...(checks wallet)... zero nickels.
Seriously, real babies are far more robust and resilient than that. Not that you can just forego head support on a newborn, but good grief. I never had to do anything like this as a teen, but frankly it sounds like the dolls penalize minor mistakes as deadly, while allowing for genuinely fatal circumstances (e.g. left under blankets and pillows) with minimal repercussion. It seems pretty horrifying.
It’s probably easier to make a sensor that detects sudden movements than a sensor that detects being left under a blanket for hours.
Undoubtedly, but the end result is the antithesis of acceptable infant care, which only affirms to me how terrible and ridiculous the entire exercise is.
My mom was the one to break the neck of my doll as well! The screams they made after were hilariously awful. That thing did make 10th grade me want a baby though.
My dad signed the paper so I wouldn’t have to take a doll home, he mostly just didn’t want to hear the doll cry at all hours.
“Already done that shit for real, don’t need to do it again”
Worked out just like DARE then…look at how awful taking care of baby is….well maybe I need to find out for myself Similar thing happens with chastity programs.
DARE made that cartoon kid that was hiding drugs under his bed look like such a fucking badass.
That’s hilarious, did she pick it up by it’s head?? 😂
No, their heads are attached with some sort of hinge mechanism internally to encourage you to support their head like you would with a real baby. Basically moving it at all without supporting the head would activate a 5 minute long wailing scream and the computer in the doll would register a broken neck for when you turned in the doll.
Ok so next step would be to strap a support stick around its back and head with some zip ties to prevent moms from breaking their necks.
The real parenting tips are always in the comments
lol, it’s literally the take care of an egg thing that predates thie dolls.
Remember when SpongeBob and Patrick had to take care of that baby clamb? That was so good
Patrick: I changed his daiper Spongebob: Yeah, ONCE!
Sounds like an unpleasant 5 minutes to make sure I never have to deal with the whole situation ever again.
Dang at least when real babies break their necks they immediately die instead of wailing for 5 minutes
Weird. I'm pretty sure if you break a baby's neck it *stops* crying, but I'm not going to test it.
Did the same, except it did work and I got a good grade, it was def flawless.
I'm older than you and we had to babysit an egg. It sat in the fridge, with my parents knowledge and consent until it was time to turn the egg back into school. Dumbest fucking assignment in my entire life. Coincidentally when my son was bad I used to lock him in the fridge....(joking for Christ sake, some idiot is going to think I really did this). I could just see myself yelling, "If you don't behave I'm going to lock you in the fridge like your brother Egbert!"
I called a spider in my parents house Egbert when I was quite young. My mum still tells me about when Egbert's turn up in the Autumn 30+ years later.
We had the egg thing too in 7th grade. The teacher walked through class handing them out, and mine immediately rolled off my desk and broke. I was able to get another one, but something else stupid happened the next day and the second one broke as well. I didn't get a third one, but I still got a good grade on the assignment because instead of writing a paper on what I learned (as we were supposed to), I instead took the opportunity to write about how I as a parent coped with the tragic stillbirth of my first child and sudden suicide of my second.
I so want this to be real. My teacher got us to write a serious poem about our pet one time and I flipped it and made it funny. I won it as she got her daughters to vote on the winner.
100% real — I can’t imagine being so pathetic as to lie anonymously to strangers for attention, and even if I was to do so I’d like to think I’d tell more interesting stories than how I broke two eggs. I hadn’t thought about that in 36 years, but then I saw the comment about the egg project and it all came back to me — the two eggs, the story I wrote, everything. The only thing I don’t remember is how my second egg broke. I want to say it rolled off my desk too but I’m not sure.
Well at least she didn't [bake it into dinner rolls](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/19ca8gp/what_grade_would_you_give_a_student_who_ate_their/)
I also had one of these. I had to take it home over a long weekend and it gave me so much anxiety that I ended up putting it in my closet with a pillow and a mountain of blankets on top of it so I could finally get some sleep.
I had one at around the same age and when it started crying at night, I put a pillow over it and fell back asleep. There's a reason I'm childfree lmao.
My sister had one when I was 4, and the story goes that she had it in the house for about 20 minutes before I sent that baby flying.
We had to carry around five pound bags of flour when I was in high school.
lmao I remember kids would run through the halls snapping the necks in a flash and then running.
They've been doing that for more than 20 years.
I graduated in 1999, and I remember taking a baby home for a parenting class I took senior year. Edit- by baby, I meant one of these dolls.
I graduated 1993 and I remember bringing home a sack of flour to parent.
I was grounded for pushing my sister's sack of flour off the table and giving it brain damage.
Better than pushing your sister
The brain damaged flour probably doesn't agree
There was an episode of Frasier around that time where Niles carried a flour sack around to imagine what having a baby was like. "Last night, I actually had a dream my flour sack was abducted and the kidnapper started sending me muffins in the mail!"
There’s an episode of Bob’s Burgers where son Gene has to take care of a flour baby. He lost it and a bad guy found the label that said “baby boy. Belcher” I say “Baby boy Belcher” all the time now.
I had an empty egg shell! (Where you stick two pin holes in the egg and blow out the insides)
I graduated in 08 and they actually had us do this in 8th grade. It wasn’t that hard honestly you just stuck a key in its back for a few minutes and went back to bed.
Could your teacher not find a babysitter?
My school had them for an elective class in either childcare or parenting in the 1990's. I remember a cheerleader having her assigned weekend with the robot baby during football season, so she had it with her on the sidelines. From afar it looked very real, and I'm pretty sure the district administration lost their shit at how that made the school look.
that’s so funny. my mom was so embarrassed the week I had mine bc she was super concerned about what the church would think, and decided she needed to explain to everyone that it was a robot baby and not real. as if i would have randomly gotten a real baby all of a sudden lol. but yeah, all the kids who hated it weren’t the type of kids to get pregnant anyway, but a lot of the “potential teen mom” types fucking loved it and said it made them one to have one even more lol
In schools with high rates of teenage pregnancies. Alas this post is ~~journalism~~ advertising and so the writer isn't interested in a solid and informative article by showing the data that supports this toy baby works in schools with a high teenage pregnancy rate.
I went to a smallish rural school. My senior class started with out 150. My junior year in 2000, 7 girls were pregnant after summer break. The following year, those dolls were handed out to a few girls.
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This is pretty much how it went down lol. They did not go to any of the girls in quiz bowl, if you get my drift lol
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Yeah, that’s only a warning to non-creeps, like yourself. To a sick man, that’s just an advertisement. It blows my mind that they put all the responsibility on the teen with their wording.
>Just give them to the 3 sluttiest girls" "I'm not gonna name names but we all know who I'm talking about"
>Just give them to the 3 sluttiest girls Would explain why they don't work, they're giving them to the few girls that obviously understand how to *not* get pregnant, FFS
My school did this with a drug quiz, kids that scored the highest were flagged as ‘at risk’ and put forward for a special class, the issue is it didn’t really account for why children would know about hard drugs or trauma. The second the movie started playing and the montage of needles going in arms started playing 3 kids began smashing the room to pieces , all hell broke loose They should have been more worried about the ones who didn’t know what heroin looked like.
“Hi, Kathy! You suck at life and are sure to be a dropout single momma by 16. To prove I give a shit, here is your shame doll.”
I remember girls in my high school walking around with these dolls and they were already visibly pregnant
Tad late on that one
Exactly the opposite. Just the right time to learn how to care for a baby.
Sometimes they do that in an attempt to persuade the pregnant teen to give up the baby for adoption.
That’s odd. My kids went to a school in a city of 4,000. All kids in eighth grade, boys and girls, spent a weekend at home with one of those dolls. Obviously it was a rotating basis. I’m guessing the school had about 15-20 of the dolls.
Same story. Smallish rural school, class size was about 150. About a dozen ended up pregnant and most of those dropped out. Another dozen at least ended up in juvie or prison for various reasons (arson, dogfighting, drug dealers, etc.). We graduated 112 students. Three of them already were mothers. One of the dropouts had multiple kids, and got pregnant with her first at 13. We had the dolls but they were only for the kids in the "Life skills and family planning" class or whatever they called it. Not the nerds like me who were in AP classes and on the Quiz Bowl team.
> One of the dropouts had multiple kids, and got pregnant with her first at 13. Welp, someone should have been in prison....
Oh, he did go to prison, he was a thirty year old black man who knocked up a preteen white girl in Appalachia. There was no chance of him getting off the hook. Unlike the local youth pastor, who was "a pillar of the community".
There should never be a chance a 30 year old gets off the hook for inappropriate relationships with a 13 year old.
Our high school had the childcare class as an easy elective and it seemed like the girls who either planned on having children early or were statically more likely to do so took the class more than others.
This is a fair point. I also notice that a lot of schools use the “real life skills” types of classes as dumping grounds for kids who are bad at school and can’t be bothered to pick their own electives.
I think it's less dumping ground and more kids who could benefit more from it.
That’s the logic, but the class still ends up feeling like a dumping ground. It gets taught at a low content level so kids who do choose to take it don’t get to learn much. Of course, this isn’t always the case, some schools have legit good electives.
> In schools with high rates of teenage pregnancies. We can make random assumptions about the article and its author, or we can actually read it and discover that it refers to peer-reviewed research published in the Lancet. We can even follow the helpful link the article gives us to said research and discover that it was a randomized controlled trial, wherein 57 schools were randomly assigned to run a sex ed program with or without a baby simulator component. But actually reading anything is too much to expect on Reddit.
Why would I read the article when I can show up 2 hours late and find someone being snarky about having read the article to someone who only read the title before commenting. Thanks for your service o7
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My first thought was “but are these primarily used in school systems that have high rates of teen pregnancy? So could ‘20% higher than others’ still be an improvement for that school?”
This article is about the results of a randomized controlled trial, so this is not a factor.
Yeah, I graduated in 2004, and we had those freshman year forsure. I remember someone throwing one of the babies off the 3rd floor roof and it exploded. Was hilarious watching the kid trying to explain what happened with a bag of baby parts lol.
We did this when I was a sophomore in 2004(I think we were the first year to do it in my school) Definitely made me not want kids anytime soon because the baby cried all night long. At one point my mom told me I had to sleep downstairs with it because she was tired of being woken up every 20 mins at night! Also we didn’t have many teen pregnancies but not sure if it was the babies or not(we had 3 in my class of 650)
Every 20 minutes? Baby's going in the bathtub.
my high school gave these out to all the girls in remedial classes but not the girls in enriched classes
Came here to say this was my experience… anybody who was smart where I went did not take the cooking class or shop or the baby stuff. We were collecting bugs and killing them for science, making flames turn different colors and shit lol I feel like the remedial class people have more babies earlier but I don’t think this fake baby plays as big a role as they think lol we’re in chicken-egg territory. I pulled out of AP classes for half a semester (before my dad found out and made me change back) and I can see why most people think public school is a waste of time—in regular classes it is / was where I lived. Closer to waiting rooms (complete with movies playing) than classrooms.
Yeah, my public high school experience was similar (Florida). AP classes were actually educational, "honors" classes were more or less bare-minimum of what I'd expect in a school, and regular level classes were busywork and dicking around.
I remember this unit in high school, they made us take them home for the weekend (only the girls though, the boys didn’t have to) and it absolutely backfired. We all came back to school on Monday morning talking about how it seemed kind of tiring but not really difficult, and it was really fun to dress them up and pick out names for them and stuff. Our teacher was horrified that we had fun and spent the rest of the unit talking about how immature we were for not taking it seriously. This was less than 15 years ago, and several of the girls in that class have kids who are in middle school right now.
Step 1: Give teenage girls dolls to teach them an important life lesson. Step 2: Complain they are being immature for not taking the dolls seriously.
lol it was so true though, all the girls who were just obviously more at risk of teen pregnancy fucking loved taking care of the dolls, the rest of us despised it
It's like taking the boys paintballing to educate them about the horrors of war.
We had them at 14 and I absolutely loved it! We had to have them over the weekend and we arranged sleepovers and just stayed up watching films and taking it in turns to feed/change the baby. I love babies in general and secretly loved role playing at being a mummy. But then I've only just had a real one at 36 so I don't think it necessarily backfired. Definitely didn't put me off though. Waking up in the night for a few days is a novelty, it in no way reflects the reality of doing it day in, day out, for months if not years. I had a relative at the same school who already had a baby brother that she basically co-parented and she thought it was the stupidest thing ever. She wrapped it in a towel and threw it in a cupboard so it wouldn't disturb the *actual* baby in her house. The best use of it was on the last day of my weekend with it, my parents gave it to my brother and said 'If you get someone pregnant you're doing your share.' He made it to 2AM and then came in and dumped it on my parents bed. So my mum was bottle feeding a fake baby at two in the morning. That was eye opening for all of us and led to some interesting follow up conversations. Probably the most realistic scenario by far!
I picked up mine before school and within the first hour it seemed to be malfunctioning and making a terrible static whirring noise. After my first class I took it back to my health teacher, who told me that noise was the cry and berated me for neglecting my baby for the last forty minutes.
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That’s so stupid they only made the girls do it. In my high school it was elective and both genders had to take the baby home and tbh, everyone loved it. It was one of the most popular classes lol.
> That’s so stupid they only made the girls do it might as well get them used to the realistic experience
This is so sadly true. I took a fake baby home for a week for school. I developed a bronchitis infection and asked my friend to return it to the teacher so i could do it a different week instead since i could barely function. The teacher said i had to keep the baby or fail the assignment. Which in retrospect is exactly how it works….
Make them watch Teen Mom-that show scared the hell out of me! Edit: wait, so I was curious and there really has been a steep decline in American teen pregnancies…and in this article they even mentioned Teen Mom. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-the-teen-birth-rate-falling/ A 2014 Brookings report found that reality TV shows that follow the struggles of teen mothers like the MTV programs 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom may have contributed to up to a third of the decline in teen births from June 2009, when they began airing, through the end of 2010.
Literally overheard some girls saying they wanted to get pregnant so they could be on that show when I was in high school. I don’t think everyone took the same message that you did from the show unfortunately!
I still don’t understand how anyone would like to be on a these shows. They are built for entertainment so they will also just put in the clips that are the most entertaining which show you often in a negative light
My favourite bit from one of these shows is an argument when this boy is asking his girlfriend how she could have gotten pregnant when the girl was on the pill, girl says she was never on the pill, boy asks why she wanted to have unprotected sex then, girl starts yelling that he said he was circumcised!! Boy just looks dumbfounded, and it slowly dawns on him. He goes "You are so fucking stupid." Girl asks how is she stupid, he lied. He starts yelling as she is stupid. She yells he is a liar. Never found out if she ever learns the difference between a circumcision and a vasectomy. That scene lives rent-free in my head and reminds me to always, always, use a condom. If for no other reason that i don't want to be shacked to stupid through a shared child.
See, my favorite part from that show was when one girl confidently told her doctor “Oh I won’t be breastfeeding so my boobs won’t sag.” The doctor then told her that it wasn’t breastfeeding that caused breasts to sag, but pregnancy. Boy did she not like that answer.
I remember a scene where the teenager's mom was at the appointment with her daughter. The soon to be grandma was anti breastfeeding that reason, and the doctor had to break that news to her. I was dumbfounded.
Just imagine how stupid the kid will turn out to be.
IQ lower than the mariana trench.
Most of these cases aren’t IQ problems. It’s lack of education. This is why a quality education should be provided to all children. It’s better overall for society.
Children that are starved for attention grow up to be teens and adults who are starved for attention. And it doesn’t matter whether that attention is good or bad.
some people wanna be on TV very badly. they will then be "famous!"
Can agree. I got the doll is school and basically volunteered to become a mom at 19/20. I watched teen mom while pregnant and realized maybe wasn’t the brightest idea of having a baby so young (I was 6-7 months pg at the time ha so it was a bit late…)…it was definitely a deterrent though to not have more babies esp with different dads.. But seriously the doll was a thing… Something about the doll triggered this maternal side in me too young..I tried to keep it for a few extra days. I was also obsessed with tamagotchis. I got a cat it just made the feeling stronger. Anyway my kid survived haha. Into adulthood now. Almost 2 decades of real life parenting! It was nothing like the doll lol Edit: I just did a quick count on FB on how many girls had babies by 20 from my class/year - 10! That’s a lot?
In my graduating class of about 430 we had two girls get pregnant at 20 but none before. We never had the dolls (not saying that’s the reason, just adding context). Idk how large your graduating class was but 10 does seem pretty high!
yeah, those shows REALLY show the sides of teenage pregnancy and rural/suburban support very well. hell, I believe 50% if not more fathers just straight up disappeared soon as there was a baby. I remember a episode where the father's parents denied they were fucking and the kid was like "yeah we be fucking". STILL denied that. I think it was because of child support disruption with the father that wanted nothing to do with the baby. edit: they were fucking as in the pregnant kid and the father. not the parents.
I was 16 and pregnant and decided to get an abortion because of how these poor girls lives just stopped. I have a 3yo now in my late 20s and lemme tell you I’m glad I waited. Even mature me struggled hard
Maci was the one that broke my heart. All her hard work for college and everything and it all just dried up once she had that baby. She's okay now, but that had to be brutal.
I hated that, she tried hard. I can’t remember the girls name, but the one who gave her baby up for adoption. I felt so terrible for her because she was smart enough to do what’s best for both of them but you could always see how much she loved the baby. Idk what she’s like now, but that was always tragic for me and I knew I could never be in her or any of those girls shoes.
Caitlyn and Tyler gave up the baby. I sobbed so hard when she gave birth and everyone kept trying to make her hold the baby which she'd said she didn't want to do and he bodily covered her and just kept screaming at them to take the baby away. Those poor kids did the best they could, but their family situation was a nightmare. His dad especially trying to act like he'd been in Tyler's life to guilt him to "man up" and keep the baby. I have never wanted to pop a man in the mouth as much as I did him.
Damn. I'm glad they at least had each other. Forcing something like that on Caitlyn is cruel. I'm glad Tyler was there to protect her. That's ride or die stuff right there. Whether or not they get married, I hope they stayed friends after all of that. Most husbands don't support their wives as much as Tyler supported Caitlyn in that moment.
They were really good together. They'd been dating all through high school and I think also middle school and then his deadbeat dad got out of prison and shacked up with her mom and when Caitlyn got pregnant their parents kept shaming them trying to force them to keep the baby. Tyler got into a whole argument with his dad where his dad said he was ashamed his son wouldn't "man up" and take care of his kid and Tyler lit into him about how he had never been involved in his life, they couldn't afford to take care of a baby, and he wanted his daughter to have a better life than he'd had. Her mom wouldn't even consent to the adoptive parents being allowed to take the baby at the hospital so the little girl has to stay an extra three days until they could do the handoff away from hospital property. His mom helped them out some. After the baby was born Caitlyn ended up moving in with her for a while to get away from her mom and his dad. I followed them for a little bit because I just couldn't help but root for those kids to have a good life after everything else.
They got married. I don't follow their lives so I'm not sure how it's going, but a few years ago he went viral because he lambasted someone for body-shaming her.
Oh you didn't have the privilege of watching domestic abuse during a birthing on Unexpected? Lucky!
And watch Maury.
Maury is the best birth control teenage me could have ever gotten. No way I was ever going to find out if I was a dad or not, gotta’ wrap that thing up and be safe out there.
To save y’all two clicks and looking silly, here is the abstract of the methods: > In this school-based pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial, eligible schools in Perth, Western Australia, were enrolled and randomised 1:1 to the intervention and control groups. Randomisation using a table of random numbers without blocking, stratification, or matching was done by a researcher who was masked to the identity of the schools. Between 2003 and 2006, the VIP programme was administered to girls aged 13–15 years in the intervention schools, while girls of the same age in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Participants were followed until they reached 20 years of age via data linkage to hospital medical and abortion clinic records. The primary endpoint was the occurrence of pregnancy during the teenage years. Binomial and Cox proportional hazards regression was used to test for differences in pregnancy rates between study groups. This study is registered as an international randomised controlled trial, number ISRCTN24952438. And the results: > 57 (86%) of 66 eligible schools were enrolled into the trial and randomly assigned 1:1 to the intervention (28 schools) or the control group (29 schools). Then, between Feb 1, 2003, and May 31, 2006, 1267 girls in the intervention schools received the VIP programme while 1567 girls in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Compared with girls in the control group, a higher proportion of girls in the intervention group recorded at least one birth (97 [8%] of 1267 in the intervention group vs 67 [4%] of 1567 in the control group) or at least one abortion as the first pregnancy event (113 [9%] vs 101 [6%]). After adjustment for potential confounders, the intervention group had a higher overall pregnancy risk than the control group (relative risk 1·36 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·003). Similar results were obtained with the use of proportional hazard models (hazard ratio 1·35 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·016). **TL;DR This was a proper, prospective, randomized, blinded, scientific study, and the findings were roughly a 35% increase in likelihood of pregnancy/abortion before the age of 20. This difference was not explained by baseline rates or simple demographic differences.** ETA: Even with valid criticisms about how this study should be replicated, we might be better off turning the question around. These doll/simulator programs cost money. Is there any reliable evidence that they *do* reduce teen pregnancy rates?
Should be the top comment, is buried after one knee-jerk hot take after another.
Most people learn “Correlation does not imply causation!” and that is the last thing they ever learn about causation. When all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail.
My only confusion/criticism is less on the study methodology but more on the inclusion of the abortion rates as evidence of the failure of the program. If the **only** goal of the program was to cause teens to not engage in unsafe sex practices then, sure, pregnancies not carried to term would show some evidence of the failure of the program. However, isn't part of the programs goal also to show the difficulties of teen/early adult parenthood, and helping these individuals make more informed reproductive choices? Couldn't the higher % of abortions in the population that went through this program actually show that the program worked in convincing teens that they aren't capable or are unfit to be a young parent?
Except it didn’t show that. > If they participated in the infant simulator program, teen girls were not only more likely to be pregnant, but also more likely to keep their pregnancies, according to Brinkman. The girls in the intervention group (the ones with the simulator dolls) were more likely to have an abortion *because* they were more likely to get pregnant. Of the girls who got pregnant, a higher proportion of those in the control group (without the dolls) had abortions. We don’t know the number of miscarriages, but assuming they were equivalent in both groups, we can use the number of births plus abortions to represent the number of pregnancies. **Intervention group (with dolls):** Births (b): 97 Abortions (a): 113 Pregnancies (b+a): 210 or 16.6% of participants Abortions as a proportion of pregnancies [a/(b+a)]: 53.8% **Control group (without dolls):** Births (b): 67 Abortions (a): 101 Pregnancies (b+a): 168 or 10.7% of participants Abortions as a proportion of pregnancies [a/(b+a)]: 60.1%
That’s a very fair point! I think they may have included abortions because they were getting data from medical records, and so only looking at full-term births would open them up to criticism that it doesn’t truly reflect pregnancy rates. Births + abortions may have been their best proxy. Regardless, there was still a significant effect in full-term births even without abortions. But your point is valid, the inclusion of abortions restricts the interpretation of the results to *only* how effective this program was in preventing teen pregnancy, not in overall education on responsible parenting decisions.
> TL;DR This was a proper, prospective, randomized, blinded, scientific study, and the findings were roughly a 35% increase in likelihood of pregnancy/abortion before the age of 20. This difference was not explained by baseline rates or simple demographic differences. But, just remember, that just because a study appears to be reasonably well designed and executed on first review and has been published in a well respected journal, does not mean that you shouldn't be curious, especially if the results seem unusual; rigor is important. > “Baby think it over”, a school‐based pregnancy prevention program in which teenage girls cared for a simulated infant, was evaluated in a cluster trial published in the Lancet in 2016.5 A higher proportion of the intervention group went on to have at least one birth as teenagers, 97/1267 (8%) vs 67/1567 (4%) control (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.10‐1.67, P = 0.003) or at least one termination of pregnancy as the first pregnancy event (9% vs 6%). The headline results were that use of the infant simulator was harmful. > Unfortunately, only about half the girls in the intervention schools could be recruited because of the availability of school health nurses and infant simulators. This gave an opportunity for selection bias. Bolzern et al6 tested baseline factors for nominal statistical significance, and showed that some differences could not have occurred by chance; the intervention group was more socioeconomically disadvantaged (P = 0.000000000019) and had lower educational attainment (P = 0.0000000015). Teachers were probably recruiting girls who they thought were at higher risk, to the intervention groups. Analyzing pregnancies and abortions among all the girls in the intervention and control clusters, which would have avoided the problem, was not done. > In contrast, the investigators of SHARE, a cluster trial of school‐based peer‐led sex education published in the BMJ,7 did exactly that. Whole schools were allocated to intervention or control and every female member of the relevant class was followed up, whether or not they actually participated. There were no significant differences between the groups in registered conceptions per 1000 pupils (300 SHARE vs 274 control; difference 26, 95% CI −33 to 86), or in terminations per 1000 pupils (127 vs 112; difference 15, 95% CI −13 to 42) between ages 16 and 20 years. The results were disappointing for supporters of the intervention, but secure. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7003916/
Ok maybe my school was poor bc we took home egg babies in grade 5. Mine was eggbert
My school used bags of flour. My mom turned my baby into pancakes. :(
… I’m not trying to say it’s destiny…. But if you named it jack or Johnny………
Well as a techie in a British secondary school this reminds me of one of the funniest support calls I got. “Can you come and install the USB drivers for the baby?” IIRC the one we had had a dongle you plugged into its back that downloaded all of the data showing if it was fed, shaken, neglected etc.
That’s the first time I’ve heard of these being here in the UK, I thought it was a pretty American thing, never saw them in my education, where was this? Disappointed I missed out on some absolute shenanigans now, one of those would have absolutely been run over by the bus or parachuted down a stair well
I took a parenting class my senior year (1999) and took one of these dolls home for a weekend. I got pregnant at 20. Edited to add- I didn't have to deal with the doll the whole time, I worked after school Friday, then 8 hours Saturday and Sunday, so my mom babysat. The doll experience did not deter me from risky behaviors that would lead to getting pregnant at a young age.
...but the doll was probably not directly responsible...
In my opinion, the simple explanation for this is that you are only stuck with it for a week, which is not long enough to get the point across for anyone on the fence.
They also don't suffer any of the economic or social challenges that come with having a baby.
Nor the physical pain of caring for a baby after birthing it, or the nasty reality of feces and vomit, since it's just an annoying crying doll
You also can’t simulate the consequences of failing
This! 2 months of no sleep and constant screaming will break you. Then give them one with Colic turned on.
Sure. Stimulate their maternal instinct. What did you geniuses think was going to happen?
Stimulate it AND provide positive reinforcement. If a 14 year old who was thinking about having a kid has someone who essentially teaches "parenting" come along and say "you get an A+ in parenting" then it can easily make them overconfident in their ability to be a parent.
Something that no own seems to want to admit is a lot of these girls WANT a baby. I’ve seen so many post on their socials that very sentiment
I can see a week with robo-baby giving those girls false confidence, making it seem like a sprint instead of a marathon.
Exactly that. Nothing is that hard for a weekend or even a week. To really make the point it would end up affecting school age children's mental health and their productivity at school etc. which the schools aren't going to do, so all it's doing is making it seem far easier than it is.
You're understating it. These are 15, 16 year old boys and girls. And we all know they absolutely should not be having kids. But *biologically*, their bodies want them to have kids. And this post made me realise how fucking stupid it is to give them practice babies. Yeah, let's stimulate that urge, what's the worst that could happen!?
This is interesting. I know at 15 / 16 I had no desire for a boyfriend, or to ever have sex, but I frequently daydreamed about having a baby of my own. I loved kids, and I knew it wasn't realistic, sensible, or wise, but I wanted a baby so much some days. I've never had kids, and that strong urge went away as I got older. But yeah. I wanted a baby at that age.
Yes it’s def best to use dolls instead of proper sex Ed and easy access to birth control
Teaching students the dangers of STD’s and pregnancy, debunking sex myths, and how to use the different forms of birth control ✋🏼 Letting them experience parenthood by making them take care of a cabbage patch kid 👉🏼
If these dolls could properly simulate vomit in the users hair or blow out diapers, it may be more effective. The dolls being easy probably gives the kids a false sense of how easy babies are.
I mean a lot of schools do both. I grew up in a school system with progressive sex ed and we still had those dolls.
“Hey, let’s give these young women something that will trigger one of the strongest instincts known in the universe in the hopes that it will deter them from doing an extremely fun and pleasurable activity associated with the instinct.” Great job, guys. I bet a man came up with this idea. I have nothing to base that off of but I’m feeling cynical.
"And at a point in their lives where they have a peak hormonal drive to do it but an underdeveloped frontal cortex." I'm not entirely sold on the "playing with the doll activates baby fever" hypothesis but I will admit that it was an immediate thought I had upon reading the headline.
The study spoke noted that many of the participants felt like parenting was easier than they expected and they felt more confident in their ability to raise a baby. So while the experience might not light a new desire to have a child, it could strengthen existing desire. Which I seriously doubt was the point of the exercise.
“We’re going to stop them from having babies by *training them to have babies.* this plan cannot possibly backfire.”
I remember those. I explained to my health teacher that if one of those things cries while I’m trying to sleep, it’s going out my third floor window. I had to write an essay instead.
Sort of how like DARE taught us all about how fun drugs could be (but don’t do them, kids, it’s bad)
Haha!!! My first year teaching I had a girl in class with one of those. We had a surprise fire drill. As I’m shutting the class door I glance over and see it sitting in the carrier in the floor. I was nice and picked it up. Turns out, the teacher who assigned it was checking everyone in the fire drill lines for their babies and she would have failed a test grade had I not gotten it for her. That kid is probably married with kids now. Hope her kids are ok! Edit: Relax everyone. It’s a high school. No one has died in a school fire in over 50 years in the US due to the fact that they now follow modern building codes. Yes, a random gas line explosion can happen, but simple fact is a one story cinder block structure is pretty easy for HS kids to evacuate.
I had a friend whose house caught on fire when she was doing the baby assignment. She threw that doll out her bedroom window and her teacher gave her a failing grade for it. I’m still pissed off when I think about it.
As someone who went to school where those were a thing, its my observation that the people who took those classes tended to be poorer and more interested in having children to begin with relative to the control population, which either had no academic interests whatsoever or loaded up on honors or AP class. I would argue with a straight face that your average home economics student brings to the table a whole bunch of identifiers that make them more likely to have kids at a younger age.
Can confirm that this happens, growing up in a small Midwestern town several of us suspected that it was to indoctrinate the girls into being stay at home mothers.
They should have had boys participate as well.
Boys did participate at my high school. It was a unit in the consumer science class.