Are Electronic Baby Dolls Really Keeping Our Teens From Becoming Pregnant?

Late in November in Pleasanton California a sixteen year old girl crashed her mini cooper into a guardrail and then slammed into a pick up truck after an electronic baby doll from the Baby Think It Over program began crying. When the police arrived on the scene of the collision the girl was still caring for the doll.

Educational babies are used in high schools across the nation in an effort to teach young people about the responsibilities of parenting. The dolls are programmed to cry and wet their diapers just like real babies and they don’t stop until the teen takes the appropriate parenting measures. Not only are these dolls designed to be racially and anatomically correct but they are also just like real babies in that some of them are fussier than others. The teen wears a special bracelet on their wrist that must plug into the doll upon every interaction so that the recording device inside the doll monitors the response correctly. When the doll is turned into the teacher at the end of the session it spits out a report to the on school computer and uses the reported factors to figure the teen’s grade.

When a participating teen takes their baby home they are given clothing, diapers, bottles, blankets and a car seat. Each baby is to be cared for in the same fashion a parent would care for a real baby and that includes carting the fake kid around wherever they go. The teen must endure the stares of bystanders and biased opinions regarding teen pregnancy from the pubic in general. As the doll’s only parent, the teen also has to maintain the responsibility of getting out of bed in the middle of the night when the doll cries to soothe it, feed it or change it.

Although I believe the Baby Think It Over program is an innovative form of scaring teens off of pregnancy I’m not entirely convinced it’s as fool proof as it claims to be. The doll is still too unrealistic for many teens to take seriously. Any teen that participates in the program that really doesn’t care if they get a passing grade is apt to just ignore its crying or bury it in the clothes hamper while they go about their daily business.

My own daughter participated in the program her freshman year. When she first brought the doll home she was excited and thought it was great fun to carry around a doll at her age without people thinking she was weird, but then the doll became more lifelike. When it cried she would rock it, feed it and change it. Sometimes the crying stopped right away and at other times it just wouldn’t stop. She wasn’t too keen on the idea of taking the doll everywhere she went when she found out it could be quite embarrassing to carry a doll to the movie theater and mall. The straw that broke the camel’s back was late one night when the doll refused to stop crying. She tried everything they taught her but it never let up. Eventually she threw the doll in my lap, covered her ears and begged me to make it stop. Because of that experience my daughter claims she never wants to have children. She says she has no patience for it.

So in this instance I can see how this program is helpful but not all teens feel the same way. There is a high number of them will do anything they can to get rid of the doll as soon as they get, bad grade or not. One student has reported wrapping the doll in a jacket and throwing it in the school locker for the duration of a weekend so that he didn’t have to hear it cry while another student claimed to roll up a piece of paper, shove it into the doll’s nose and pretend the doll was snorting glitter. Holding the doll while driving has become commonplace and some has managed to slip out of the bracelet in order to hand the doll over to other people to care for. The really disturbing aspect of this program is the extremely high rate of teen girls who think these dolls are fun and have begun to consider having real babies based on the great time they had with their Baby Think It Over baby. While many schools are reporting a decrease in teen pregnancy as a result of the program, many parents are expressing concern over their daughter’s new found enthusiasm.

As the educational baby program continues to grow and evolve I think it will have a higher impact on teens in the future when used in conjunction with the empathy pregnant belly. However, the success of this experience totally depends on the attitude and mentality of the teen utilizing it. Perhaps educators and parents should consider addressing that issue way before handing out a doll that will wind up locked inside some teenager’s trunk.