Electronic Babies Teach Students About Parenting

Human Growth and Development at Goddard High School is one of the electives that students can take to further their knowledge in the costs of parenting and just being a parent in general. In the class, students are required to take home a electronic baby that resembles an infant.

Students take the baby home, where it will need to be fed, changed, rocked, and burped regularly. The baby will have a different schedule every day, some days will be harder than others and the can cry for about thirty minutes at a time if it is just being fussy. The students will have to get up at night when the baby cries or their grade will go down.  The baby will have a report that the teacher is able to print out when the weekend is over. They have a sensor that can tell the teacher if the head was tilted back or the baby was left to cry for more than two minutes.

“The babies are an old model and will need to be replaced because they may start dying and they don’t fix this model anymore,” said Mrs. Tish Dimick, FACS teacher.

This school year, one of the babies has died, and the school had to find a replacement. About seven to eight babies are on the early stages of dying. Sometimes they won’t turn on when the class needs to practice with the babies. Sometimes the babies will not follow a command they are given or their speakers will go out and people can not hear them cry. The technical support team for the school said that they can nott be repaired because they no longer offer repairs on the model and the only option is to replace them.

Why was that important? The students can not do the assignment if they have no babies. If the school gets new ones, it will insure that they will not go out. The babies are about five to eight years old and the model isn’t sold anymore. This also causes a problem that the babies are really expensive. Goddard High has twenty babies, and they would all need replaced. That will cost the school about $8,000. That is a lot of money for a school that has other sports and activities.

The babies have changed over the years.

“When I took the class, we had flour babies. You took a bag of flour and carried it around for the weekend. We got points taken off for every piece of damage on the flour bag,” Jennifer Gibson, age 36, parent.

“I had a egg that I had to carry around,” Kelsey Gibson, age 19, college student. “I ended up having 4 eggs because I kept dropping them.”

Most schools don’t use electronic babies because they may not have enough money or they may not have enough students that take the class and feel it is a waste of money to get them. There are some schools that do not have the class at all. Human Growth is an informative class for students who plan to have kids in the future.