A 24-hour parenting simulation turns Seattle teens off the idea of having babies

Back in the day, a high school health teacher might give students a raw egg, or a 10-pound sack of flour, and tell them to take care of it like it was a baby. But any parents can tell you this sounds more like pancake batter than parenting.

At Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School, students get lifelike baby dolls that are programmed to cry at random times throughout the day and night.

“It either needs to be rocked, burped, fed or it needs it’s diaper changed,” said sophomore Olive Royal, when her baby started crying.

The doll has a chip in it, and students wear special bracelets that can stop the baby from crying. Their teacher, Cindy Jamieson, electronically monitors their parenting skills.

“It holds the students accountable because you can’t put it in the closet, like you could the egg or the flour sack,” Jamieson said. “It’s going to give me accurate details on when it cried and how long it took you to care for it, if you missed care. It even will record abusive actions like if you shake the baby or you mishandle it.”

Each student only takes the baby for 24 hours, but for 16-year-old sophomore Zamora Gissel, that was long enough to make teen pregnancy seem like a very bad idea.

“You kind of expect it to be difficult. But I didn’t expect it to be as hard as it actually turned out to bem” Gissel said. “Mine cried a lot. Every three hours I’d wake up and be awake for, like, an hour taking care of it. I was very, very annoyed by the time the morning came around. It really hit me in the middle of the night, waking up for the fifth time, that, wow, this sucks!”

Sixteen-year-old Omari Husseini was the first in the class to get a baby.

“My baby’s name was Evan, but the girls chose that for me. I wanted to pick Banana but they said it’s ridiculous,” Husseini said.

He was excited to take care of his baby, until it started crying.

“It’s a really crazy experience,” he said. “I’d advise teens not to have sex. If you’re going to have sexual intercourse with the person you love, you have to wait because there could be a child involved. I want to wait until I’m much older to have kids. At least 30.”

Clearly the experiment is working; these teens do not want to have babies and data shows this program does reduce teen pregnancy. But Ms. Jamieson wants to point out that she’s not teaching abstinence-only sex education.

“Teens who report that they’ve received comprehensive sex education, which is more than abstinence-only, are 50 percent less likely to experience an unintended pregnancy,” Jamieson said. “And that’s really one of the goals of the program; that they become parents when the time is right. And when they do become parents they are really great parents.”

No offense to sophomore Brian Smit, but I don’t think he’s quite ready to be a really great parent.

“I was co-parenting with another kid from a different class and he spent the night at my house,” Smit said. “I just made him sleep with it so it didn’t wake me up. Usually, you have to feed [the baby] but sometimes we would prop [the bottle] up against something or tape it or something because we didn’t really want to hold [the bottle] much longer. I would tape it to it’s head and it’s hand. I would just try and find the easiest way possible to do anything with the baby.”

Most students feel like Zamora, Omari and Brian, that the baby was annoying, too much work. But sometimes the experiment backfires, like in the case of Olive Royal.

“I really liked doing this!” Olive says, cradling the doll. “Yeah, I bonded with my baby.”

Olive kept the baby longer than 24 hours, she loved it so much.

“I heard it was the best form of birth control but it kind of just made me want a baby!” Olive said. “I wouldn’t actually want to have a baby right now but it made me excited to have kids in the future.”

The students also wear heavy pregnant bellies around school to experience what it feels like to be pregnant.