Text baby vs. real baby: Teaching kids about pregnancy

Babies are having babies.

I’ve known this since I was in high school. Our school had a day care. It wasn’t for the children of teachers.

My high school also didn’t have a program in health class
where students would pair up and share the responsibilities of caring for a child. Perhaps the
administration decided to skip the program because the
pregnancy rate was already so high, or, maybe, that’s
why the pregnancy rate was so high.

The number of child-bearing teens in my high school didn’t mean that I haven’t witnessed the babies taking care of babies experiment on television. And, throughout time, it’s been an evolution in technology. It started with a sack of flour, then an egg. When they were done with food products, many schools’ health programs received babies that would actually cry and needed a special “key” plugged into the baby to indicate that the class assignment had been fed, diaper-changed, and burped. A disk would tell the teacher later how well that baby had been cared for.

A computer inside a baby doll? That’s pretty high tech,
but it’s nothing compared to DoSomething.org‘s new
campaign. It’s designed to encourage teens to feel the
constant necessity of parenting: A text that comes straight to a willing teen’s phone.

Will it be successful? A scholarship prize is offered to
teens who can encourage their friends to sign up, in what
looks like a willing pyramid scheme to spam out friends’
phone numbers. The prize is $2,000.

But before the cash, you have to text “diaper” to a number received in an email.

A writer at Jezebel signed up for her
own texting baby and had a humorous exchange with the
“crying infant” on the other end of the phone.

What those texts seemed to be lacking, however, are the
real constant pressures of raising a baby. It appears that text baby needs less attention than the average Tamagotchi toy. I miss phone calls and
texts from time to time. The texts are not like the
computer baby doll that actually emits a crying sound
until you turn its magic key. It’s also certainly not as
fragile as the egg, shared between you and the (hopefully
good-looking in the awkward adolescent stage) partner that had to ensure that thin shell didn’t break. Your egg-kid had to literally be in one piece.

DoSomething.org’s program is apparently not meant to reach out to potential teen moms, but instead, hit the dude demographic. According to the DoSomething
website:

When the baby texts you with needs, you’re supposed to
text back. From these responses though, it
sounds like the “baby” might have some attitude; and
without the constant carrying pressures, some of the
weight of the matter seems to be lifted too.

A real baby’s daily schedule is also far more pressing then the text baby. Take for example the schedule of MyNorthwest.com editor Stephanie Klein’s baby:

4-4:30 a.m. Eat
Play, diaper, cry
5:30-8:30 a.m. Sleep
8:30 a.m. Eat
Play, diaper
10 a.m. Eat
Diaper
11 a.m. Eat some more
11:30-1 p.m. Sleep
Diaper
1:10-2 p.m. Eat/sleep
2-3 p.m. Play/Diaper
3 p.m. Go for a walk with mom/sleep
4-4:45 p.m. Eat
Diaper
5-6 p.m. Sleep
6-8 p.m. Awake/playing
Diaper
8:30-9:30 p.m. Eat/doze
9:30 p.m.-2:30 a.m. Cry
2:30-4 a.m. Sleep

and Repeat.

Text baby: You’re just not that hardcore.