baby think it over assignment

BABY!: Think it Over

This assignment includes a simulated parenting experience for students enrolled in CALM 20. Students will take home Baby-Think-It-Over (an infant simulator of a 1-2 month old newborn) for a period of either one weekend or two school nights. This baby is cared for exclusively by the “parent’. Babysitters are not allowed. Baby should not be subjected to second hand smoke as it is harmful to real babies and it is difficult to get the smell of smoke out of the body and clothes of Baby-Think-It-Over.

• There will be times when your activities/job will be interrupted by baby
• Inform your coaches/boss and be sure they are aware of your participation in the assignment.
• Do not let other students handle your baby, they can look but not touch. Any extra handling could result in an abuse if they do not hold your baby properly.

Students are to summarize their parenting experience by making a baby book – a collection of all of your baby’s memories. The contents required in the book are listed below. This book is to be contained in a duo-tang or stapled together. Remember fancy books are not required, what is required is the basic information in a neat and readable project handed the week after having the baby.

Baby, Think it Over Alternate Activity

My teenager brought an ‘infant simulator’ home from school, and I think I’m a grandma now

Parenting classes used to send students home with eggs to care for. now, some get a sophisticated robot that can cost up to $1,000 to replace..

The fake babies first showed up at my house for a sleepover with my daughter, Anna. They were not exactly invited. Her three best friends were taking an early childhood class at their high school and their signature assignment — a crash course in caring for a frighteningly realistic doll — landed on the weekend of Anna’s 15th birthday. We told ourselves the shared experience would be fun.

It was not fun.

The lifelike robot babies — one white, one black, one Asian — made for adorable additions to the pictures on Snapchat, but to say they hijacked the fun would be an understatement. They needed diapers changed and bottles administered. They could only be transported in full-size car seats. They were cute, yes, but maddeningly needy.

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The all-about-me lifestyle of the modern teenager has no space for needy infants. The girls could have been lolling around on the couches without a care in the world, staring at their phones and liking things at their leisure until boredom compelled them to demand a ride to The Cheesecake Factory. Yet here they were, selflessly tending to the needs of other small creatures. One of the girls was an anxious mess, muttering something like, “I can’t,” while trying to puzzle out what little Liam could possibly need now. Another was exhausted, commiserating with the third about her baby’s especially fragile neck. Splayed across the couches with their fake babies and their diaper bags, the girls looked defeated even before the pizza was delivered.

As the night went on, my daughter grew antsy and asked if I could drive them somewhere.

“What, are you feeling cooped up with the babies on a Friday night?” I asked, perhaps a little too gleefully. “Sorry! I can’t fit all those car seats in my car.”

I went to bed, giggling a little. The girls have never gotten less sleep at a sleepover. Camped out in the basement, they were intermittently awakened by cries through the night. Upstairs, I slept like the well-behaved baby they wished they had, drunk on a big cup of schadenfreude.

This was, I had come to realize, not just immersion training for students who think they want to work with kids. It was birth control.

The fake babies were born from a similarly twisted idea. A real-life California couple, Rick and Mary Jurmain, were exhausted by the needs of their two young children. Their firstborn had colic that kept them from sleeping through the night for 11 months. Their second had “a cry that could peel paint off the wall,” recalls Rick Jurmain, who now lives in Burlington, Vermont, to be closer to his adult children. “I literally had to leave the room when she cried,” he adds. (That second baby is now attending law school at Northeastern University.)

It was the early ’90s, when there was incessant hand-wringing about teen pregnancy, and the Jurmains came across a PBS show illustrating how parenting education was then being taught in school: A student carried around an egg or a sack of flour, as if that was a realistic burden.

“I remarked to Mary that a sack of flour doesn’t wake you up in the middle of the night,” he says. “And she remarked flippantly, ‘Well, why don’t you build something that does?’”

He was, literally, a rocket scientist, who was about to be laid off. So he went to the garage and set about designing something truer to life. The first model, named Baby Think It Over, was unsubtle in its message and mostly needed to be comforted when it cried. A proper response involved turning a key in its back and holding it for a while.

Today, the RealCare Baby 3 infant simulator is a fantastically sophisticated, computer-programmed doll that costs up to $1,000 to replace if you lose it. (I know because I had to sign a waiver; Anna’s school has six of them, provided through a grant from a local education foundation.) The student wears a corresponding wristband that logs his or her responses to the baby through a radio frequency identification tag. Then she — and most of the caregivers are female — has to determine what the baby needs, based on distinctly different cries. “Just like a real baby, you eventually kind of can tell — that’s a fussy, I-just-need-to-be-rocked cry or that’s a really hungry cry,” says Samantha Forehand, marketing communications manager for Realityworks, the small Wisconsin company that makes them.

The fake baby must be fed, burped, changed, and soothed, and though its needs may seem random, its patterns are real. The programming is based on the habits of real babies, logged by real parents. There are 14 different programs with easy, medium, or hard settings selected or randomized by a teacher before the baby is sent off with its caretaker on a Friday night. A weekend immersion program is recommended; by Sunday, the students are usually crying, too.

The RealCare Baby has a patented neck with sensors that can detect if its head is not supported properly, prompting a unique cry that issues an ominous warning. It also registers three other “abuses” — shaking the baby, holding it upside down, or physical abuse — and records neglect if the student doesn’t tend to it. Unlike an egg or a sack of flour, this baby gives reports on how it has been treated. And it resists baby-sitting by a willing relative: the doll only responds to the wristband worn by the student who brought it home.

That’s the genius and the curse of it. If she fails, everyone will know — the maternal guilt is built right in. It’s a twist that’s galling to women like myself who are concerned with gender dynamics. But it’s also relatable to women who have nursed their infants. Blame nature or nurture, biology or patriarchy, but it’s still often true that no one else but Mom will do.

At my daughter’s school, it’s mostly just girls who are signing up for this. The class that employs the fake baby is an elective, and over five years, only two boys have taken it — one of them on a dare.

Ironies abound, though. This year, the teacher is a dad who used to teach at my daughter’s elementary school. And early on, the inventor, Jurmain, ceded leadership of the company to his wife, whom he recognized was a better manager, and became the kids’ lead caregiver. (His wife died in 2016; Realityworks has new leadership.)

This year, Anna enrolled in the early childhood class knowing full well what she was getting into after that first sleepless sleepover. The mother-daughter lessons walloped us right away.

“Where’s the baby? ” I cooed as I returned home from work. I think I even had my arms outstretched and fingers splayed, like a natural-born grandmother.

When Anna asked me to hold the baby while she made breakfast, I marveled at the sweetness in my arms. I got all gooey and nostalgic, and then immediately uncomfortable. I had forgotten to prop up my left arm with a pillow. I also wanted to continue reading the newspaper, and that’s hard to do with one hand. I tried, while being careful not to bobble the neck. I had a flashback to my days of breast-feeding, recalling how trapped I used to feel in that nursing glider for hours on end, and how ineptly I had attempted to multitask when I was pumping.

My daughter was infinitely patient with the baby, named Lila, but she quickly adopted the habits of a harried mom. After one night with Lila, she posted a note outside her door: “Baby Asleep So I’m going Back to Sleep. Please be Quiet XOXO!”

By the third day, she was frustrated that she couldn’t find time to take a shower. Her teacher would let her “turn off” the baby for a predetermined time — a two-hour window permitted for obligations like basketball practice — but that time was already committed to a family outing. I watched the stress creeping up on my daughter and tried to be a good grandmother. I offered to watch the fake baby while it slept and to bring it to Anna in the bathroom if it stirred.

“No, it’s OK,” Anna said, resigned. “I’ll just take her in with me.”

I remembered that pressure — there was no escape. I hated that she felt it, already. But it was part of the lesson.

Anna brought Lila to all her usual haunts: to the Chinese restaurant for her weekly dinner with her three best friends; to the salon, where we had appointments scheduled (did I imagine it, or did the receptionist’s face flash judgment when she saw the infant carrier and assumed Anna had become a real teen mom?); to one of her friend’s houses.

She cheated just a wee bit. Car seats are mandatory, of course, but she lifted the baby out to burp it while we were moving. If she didn’t, she argued, she’d have to keep running back in the house for one more burp or bottle or diaper change. How would she ever get anywhere, she wondered.

“You don’t,” I explained. “That’s why moms are late all the time or stay home.”

I drove down Main Street, worrying that we’d get pulled over by police for — what, exactly? Driving with an unbuckled doll? — I don’t know. It could happen, I guess. Police were once called to rescue a crying fake baby left in a car outside a mall, recalls Forehand, of Realityworks. They had to break into the car, the educator got a call, and the student got a jarring real-world lesson. For the most part, though, with a fake baby, the stakes are refreshingly low.

When Anna mistakenly worried that she’d heard the “bobble cry” — the sound the baby makes when its neck isn’t supported right — she nearly broke down in tears. That would cost her three points on her grade, she fretted, and make her “feel like I failed.” I tried to comfort her gently by pointing out that with a real baby, the results of a mistake are far worse.

Anna asserted that in some respects, the RealCare Baby was more difficult to manage than a real one. (A “dirty diaper” cry would easily be identified by scent, for instance.) I tried not to scoff too elaborately. This baby never had a dirty diaper. Unlike real babies, RealCare Babies are fluid-free. They don’t consume, spill, spit, or emit anything, let alone shoot it across the room in projectile fashion. Yes, Lila took a long time to burp, I granted. But at least she didn’t spit up all over herself afterward and need a complete wardrobe change “every single time, even in the middle of the night,” I said, perhaps a bit too bitterly.

This baby could be put down for a nap on a chair or a couch and had no risk of falling off. You could sleep next to the baby in bed and not fret about SIDS. You could make mistakes that would cause no irreversible damage or therapy costs down the road.

This baby was made of plastic. It would outlast all of us.

Whether this endeavor actually deters teen pregnancies is an open question. One Australian study suggests it actually increases teen pregnancies. That study, however, coincided with an Australian governmental incentive that paid women a lump sum per baby in an effort to improve the nation’s fertility rate, so go figure.

The RealCare Baby is used in 67 percent of school districts in the country, but for an array of different reasons. It comes with four different curricula: basic infant care, parenting, and health/sex education appropriate for two different age groups. Anna’s school, in our suburb north of Boston, primarily uses the dolls for infant care and parenting training, attracting baby sitters and those considering careers in education or pediatrics.

Anna has always been a natural with children — she’s just like my mother in that way — and her devotion to a fake baby was remarkable. As a bonus, she suddenly seemed to recognize all the things I was doing for her. My independent, chronically dissatisfied teenager was being appreciative.

When I returned from the grocery store, she offered to help me carry in bags. When I drove her and Lila to a friend’s house, she not only said “Thank you,” but also, “Love you.”

She did not, however, feel much attachment to the doll for which she was working so hard. When I remarked on how cute the baby was, she responded, “Eh.”

“I don’t love her,” Anna acknowledged.

It occurred to me that this fake baby wasn’t giving her caregiver much positive feedback. The doll cooed and made cute little breathy sounds, but its expression never changed and its eyes never closed. Lila just stared off into the middle distance, issuing demands.

Lila was a taker. And in the end, that may be the most crucial distinction between a RealCare Baby and a real one who, in her primitive way, at least, convinces you she loves you back. She smiles and sighs contentedly. She lights up when she looks at you. We recognize ourselves in our babies, then gasp at fresh expressions that make them wholly their own. That’s the attachment that gets parents through all those fitful nights — not guilt or duty. And certainly not an A in class.

My own baby smelled like rain. She was sociable and magnetic, attracting anyone in a crowd with her bright, vivid eyes and her deep dimples. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. When she slept, I watched her dreams play out behind her smooth, closed eyelids, which rippled and twitched in a rapidly changing display of intense emotions: Concern! Distress! Bliss!

She was mesmerizing. I remember all that, too.

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @StephanieEbbert .

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Baby Think it Over: A Project About Parenthood

Students in child development learn how to take care of babies, and the responsibilities that come with doing so

Bryden Bell

A baby sits in the provided car seat, waiting for a student to take it home.

Bryden Bell , Reporter September 23, 2022

For people who have taken child development or are considering it, they might have heard of The Baby Think it Over project. 

The project itself is tasking students with taking care of a computerized baby that records how you take care of it over the span of 24 hours. The baby records back to the teacher, Mrs. McFadden, and she can see how the baby reacts under your care. This project teaches students how to care for a child, and gives the students who take home the baby a sense of responsibility. 

When you take home the baby, you get a diaper bag that’s filled with everything you need. Inside there is a diaper, a baby bottle, a swaddling blanket, and you also get a carseat for the baby. 

Mrs. McFadden, who taught child development for five years, actually took home the baby when she was in high school. 

“I loved it, that’s part of the reason why I became a FACS teacher, just because I love child development class so much,” McFadden said.

When asked what do you think students can take away from this project, McFadden said, “I think the students will probably be more cautious or hesitant to become parents themselves.” 

Some students shared some past reactions with taking care of the baby. 

“It was nerve wracking to be honest, because you kind of have this extra person in the room that you put all your attention towards,” freshman Loukya Vaka said. Vaka then mentioned that she understood what her parents went through. 

Freshman Londyn Riley found the project to be fun but a little stressful.

“I was afraid I was going to miss the signals for my baby, but overall the baby wasn’t horrible,” Riley said. “I felt more responsibility for me and my baby.”

Facts about the baby

• Each baby cost around $600
• The baby will wake you up at night at least one time.
• The baby will cry around every 30 minutes, more if you don’t check in on time.
• If you leave your baby unattended while it cries, the baby will record that, reporting to McFadden that you have neglected your child.

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Baby Think It Over Alternative Assignments

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Here are 4 alternative assignments for your students who are choosing not to take the electronic baby home. You can decide how many assignments you want your students to do in place of the baby.

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The Decision to Have a Baby or Two

These exercises can help you decide on having a baby..

Updated May 16, 2024 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

• What Is Pregnancy?
• Find counselling near me
• The decision to have a baby or remain child-free is one of the biggest you’ll make.
• Values, decision-making, and narrative frameworks are useful for these decisions.
• These exercises can facilitate thoughtful and intentional decision-making and discussions.

Deciding whether or not to have a baby or further expand your family is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in your lifetime. As such, it can be a difficult decision-making process for many.

Because of the multiple competing factors that go into making this decision, it can be helpful to have a framework for guiding decision-making and discussions if you are making this decision with a partner. As such, below are several exercises to help you be more intentional in your decision-making and discussions about entering parenthood for the first or a subsequent time.

Values help orient us to what is most meaningful in life and can help guide decision-making. When our values are aligned with our behaviors and life choices, we tend to feel and live better—when they are not, we tend to suffer. Values are different for different people and can change throughout our lives. As such, if you engage in the exercise below and decide against adding a(nother) baby to your family today, it can be worth revisiting because of the capacity for change.

Take some time and reflect on your values. Below are a few examples of values to consider:

• Nurturing – to care for others
• Adventure – to explore and seek out new experience
• Connection – to be present and engage with others
• Family – to have a family
• Freedom – to live freely with spontaneity

While values can’t tell you whether or not you should have a baby, reflecting on your values allows you to consider how aligned family building is with what you believe to be important in life. It will also help you evaluate what values need to be reviewed with flexibility. For example, if you strongly value adventure and decide to have a baby, how can you maintain this important part of your identity ? It does not have to be an either/or.

Future Thinking

Another exercise is to imagine your future self in one, five, or 10 years after the decision to have a(nother) baby. Now repeat this exercise, after the decision not to have a(nother) baby. Imagine what your life would look like in each of these future scenarios. Be as descriptive as possible about what your life would be like. Share this description with your partner if you are in a partnership.

• Where are you?
• Who are you with? What do your relationships and family look like?
• How do you feel?
• What are you doing? What’s going on around you?
• How did you get here?

Building on the previous exercise, you can also reflect on how each imagined scenario reflects (or doesn’t) your values. The last question in the bulleted list (i.e., how did you get here?) is important because it reflects the family-building process and what you envision for your reproductive story.

Reproductive Story

A person’s reproductive story is the narrative we develop about what it will be like to be a parent. It is our hopes and dreams about creating and having a family, the visions of what our children will be like, and how we will parent them. Because much of this narrative is unconscious and begins developing in early childhood , it might not be obvious until we stop and bring it into awareness. The piece of the reproductive story I encourage you to consider is how you envision creating a family (i.e., the question “ How did you get here ?” from the previous exercise).

You can ask the following questions:

When you (and your partner) think about the family-building process, is it important to you and them to:

• Have a biological tie to your children?
• Carry a pregnancy and give birth?
• Have multiple children, so there are siblings?
• Have children of a certain sex or other biological characteristics?

Answers to some of these questions may help guide and expand family-building options.

Current Life—What Would Change?

If you decide not to add a(nother) baby your life can likely continue similarly to the present. On the other hand, as much as we would like to fantasize about adding a(nother) baby to our lives, it is also important to think about the real and logistical changes this entails. Spend some time thinking about this and the feasibility of adding a(nother) baby to your life. While child expenses can vary widely based on multiple factors (e.g., location, childcare, insurance, first versus subsequent child, etc.), it will be important to take a realistic account of what costs will be associated with adding a(nother) child. In addition to financial costs, you should consider other potential costs—costs to your relationships, health, career , etc. These are other important areas for consideration and conversation between you and your partner.

Only you (and your partner) can decide to bring a(nother) baby into your family. The hope of utilizing the exercises in this post is to help you move away from feeling pressured to make the “right” decision and instead help you choose in the right way —through thoughtful and intentional decision-making and discussion.

Rachel Diamond, Ph.D., LMFT, PMH-C, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified in perinatal mental health through Postpartum Support International. She maintains a private practice, Rachel Diamond, PLLC, in Chicago.

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BREAKING: Xander Schauffele wins 2024 PGA Championship 

Body shaming, IQ insults and cross talk: House committee meeting devolves into chaos amid personal insults

WASHINGTON — Criticism of a member's "fake eyelashes" and another's intelligence. A question about discussing a member's "bleach blond, bad-built butch body."

A House Oversight Committee meeting Thursday night devolved into chaos amid personal attacks and partisan bickering in a rare evening session that was supposed to center on a resolution recommending Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress.

The already tense hearing was derailed when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., responded to a question from Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, by saying, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

Democrats, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, immediately moved to strike Greene's words from the record and make her apologize to Crockett.

"That is absolutely unacceptable," Ocasio-Cortez said over cross talk. "How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?"

Greene taunted Ocasio-Cortez, asking, "Are your feelings hurt?"

"Oh, girl? Baby girl," Ocasio-Cortez shot back. "Don't even play."

Greene attacked a second member just minutes after she criticized Crockett, asserting that Ocasio-Cortez did not have "enough intelligence" for a debate.

Greene had asked Ocasio-Cortez, "Why don't you debate me?"

Ocasio-Cortez responded that she thought "it's pretty self-evident."

"You don't have enough intelligence," Greene said as members of Congress audibly groaned at her attack.

Greene agreed to strike her comments toward Crockett but vehemently refused to apologize for the evening's attacks, declaring, “You will never get an apology out of me.”

Amid repeated demands from Democrats to strike Greene’s words from the record and force her to apologize, Comer eventually ruled that Greene’s insult of Crockett did not violate House rules against engaging in “personalities” during debate. When Democratic ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland sought to appeal the ruling, Republicans offered a motion to table, or kill, his appeal.

After the vote, Crockett asked Comer for clarification to understand his ruling about personal attacks on members of Congress.

"I'm just curious, just to better understand your ruling," Crockett said. "If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach blond, bad-built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?"

Chaos erupted again, with a member instructing Crockett to "calm down."

"I have two hearing aids. I'm very deaf," the committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said after cross talk took over. "I'm not understanding — everybody's yelling. I'm doing the best I can."

After Comer agreed to strike Greene’s insult of Ocasio-Cortez, Democrats sought to enforce committee rules that would have prevented Greene from speaking for the rest of the hearing. Republicans voted to allow her to speak.

Comer ultimately called for a short recess amid debate over questions about a rule for members who have had comments struck from the record but wished to speak. Upon return, he reminded members to observe "the House's standard of decorum."

Greene was ultimately recognized to speak for more than four minutes, during which she reiterated that she would not apologize.

"I will not apologize for my words, and I will not change them," she said.

Nearly an hour after the hearing was derailed, the committee got back to debating whether Garland should be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over audio recordings of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur over his handling of classified documents.

Tensions were already running high after a long day, with Republicans peppering Raskin's opening remarks with interruptions.

The meeting had originally been scheduled for 11 a.m., but it was moved to 8 p.m. after several committee members traveled to New York to attend the trial of former President Donald Trump .

The committee voted 24-20 along party lines to recommend holding Garland in contempt following the contentious meeting. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office has not yet said when it would put the contempt resolution before the full House.

Rebecca is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the House.

Megan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fight during House hearing

WASHINGTON — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., butted heads at a House Oversight Committee markup session Thursday night, after Greene attacked Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, saying she was wearing “fake eyelashes.”

The meltdown began as lawmakers were discussing the issue of holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to release audio recordings of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. Hur released a scathing report earlier this year that described Biden as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

At one point during the hearing, Greene asked Democrats whether any of them were employing Loren Merchan, the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial . Loren Merchan heads a digital advertising agency that works with Democratic candidates - and has become the target of Trump allies.

“Do you know what we’re here for?” Crockett asked Greene to which she replied, “I don’t think you know what you’re here for. I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

The comments immediately drew outrage from Ocasio, who fired back at Greene, “That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.”

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Greene asked Ocasio-Cortez, “Are your feelings hurt?”

Ocasio-Cortez replied, “Oh girl, oh baby girl, don’t even play.”

The two paused their contentious exchange as Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., tried to get order. But after Ocasio-Cortez demanded that Greene apologize, the two launched into another fight with Greene refusing to apologize.

“Why don’t you debate me?” Greene asked.

“I think it’s pretty self-evident,” Ocasio-Cortez fired back.

“Yeah, you don’t have enough intelligence,” Greene replied. 

The committee eventually voted to advance contempt proceedings against Garland.