Fifteen-year-old Shaila Dominguez dreaded the thought of taking her baby out in public, but it was a rare day when she didn't have work or school or both, and Christmas was fast approaching. So on an overcast December afternoon in Rapid City, S.D., she strapped the baby into its animal-print car seat, swung by Taco John's to pick up her paycheck, and made her way to the nearest Walmart.
In the toy aisle, Shaila picked out a robotic turtle for her 4-year-old cousin, with whom she shares a room in their aunt's single-wide trailer. Seconds after she paid the cashier, the baby began to cry, so Shaila perched the car seat on a vacant checkout counter and swapped a green diaper for a yellow one. An elderly man with long white hair approached in a motorized wheelchair. Shaila had draped a blanket to shield the baby from view. Without asking, the man used his thumb and two forefingers to peel it back for a glimpse. "They still make 'em that small!" he said, laughing, and rolled away.
Shaila, who has a pretty, round face and big brown eyes that she makes look bigger with a catlike swoop of black liner, froze in a nervous half-smile. "I don't know if he thinks I'm weird because it's fake, or if he thinks it's real," she said. "I'm so confused. I don't know what to think!"
The baby was indeed a phony, made of vinyl and circuitry instead of flesh and bone. Shaila had to take it everywhere—to fill up the tank of her beat-up Mercury Cougar, to her grandfather's house to eat dinner, to the grocery store to buy cat food—as part of a school assignment designed in part to prevent her from becoming an actual teen mom. A teen mom like her own mother was when she gave birth to Shaila at 14. A teen mom she doesn't want to become, because she knows it could forestall her dreams of being the first in her family to go to college and eventually to law school.
"I like to argue," she'd said when I asked her the night before why she wanted to become a lawyer, her dark hair pulled high into a topknot. "And also because I want to help people."
"I think it's pooping!" Jasmine squealed. "Well, I think it's fine," Shaila said, then headed out the doorSince its invention in 1992, the infant simulator that Shaila carried around has become a staple of American education, reaching more than 6 million students at 17,000 schools. It's used in 91 countries around the world—an impressive footprint for the private, 63-person company in Eau Claire, Wis., that invented it, Realityworks, which estimates it controls 95 percent of the infant-simulator market.
For educators such as Wendy Conrad, Shaila's child development teacher at Rapid City Central High School, the appeal of the robot baby is straightforward: Once teenagers see how tough parenthood is, the last thing they'll want to do is have unprotected sex. At $649 each, not counting software and accessories such as car seats and diaper bags, the simulators are no small purchase for schools.
But purchase they do, despite a growing body of research raising doubt about their effectiveness. The latest study, the first randomized, controlled trial to test the intervention's long-term effectiveness on pregnancy outcomes, was the most damning of all. Published in August by Australian researchers in the Lancet, a prominent British medical journal, it found that girls who cared for the electronic progeny got pregnant and gave birth at a higher rate than those who didn't.
Recognizing the threat the study posed to its babies, Realityworks came out like a mother grizzly. "I can only trust that researchers do a good job," says Chief Executive Officer Timm Boettcher, 45. "But that doesn't happen every time, which is why we have the term 'junk science.' "
In 1992 a recently unemployed rocket scientist named Rick Jurmain was sitting on a couch next to his wife, Mary, in their ranch-style home in a San Diego suburb. They were exhausted parents of a newborn baby girl and a 4-year-old boy whose colic had left them sleepless for his first 11 months. On the TV flicked a PBS show on sex education, showing teens carrying flour sacks to mimic parenthood. (Chicken eggs, with their obvious fragility, were also popular at the time.)
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Have the Children Educated in Storytelling that Portrays what it is like to raise a Child on Food Stamps, Birth Parent in a relationship with a Physically, Sexually, and/or Verbally Abusive Spouse, Divorce and the Epigenetic effects of the Shame, Guilt and Anxiety* manifested and Programmed into children, Spiteful Female Dogs called Bitches that need Alimony as an ATM and Sugar Daddies as Birthday and Holiday Charities for a Ho Ho HO!
Dolls of Babies is just role play without feedback from the effigy and it is Cute with Strangeness that isn't strange to those who want to have kids, those who don't want spawn it is Boring and an annoying Hassle of a Chore.
I thought Abstinence of Chastity rings was Idiocratic just like Homosexual Gender Preference Boot Camp of the Christian Right like Michelle Bachman's Husband or Intercourse for reproduction through a hole cut in a Sheet like Hasidic Jews, Chattel and Cattle no difference when observed by an Autonomy-Minded and Independently Spirited Human.