It’s a staple of sitcoms & dramas involving teenagers. As part of a class (usualy health or home ec) students are given a doll, egg, or bag of flour and have to pretend it’s a baby & care for it for a week. Sometimes the assignment also involved students being paired up into married couples for a week. Has anybody actually done this in real life? :dubious: Was it part of an elective or something all students had to do? I’m 25 and never did anything like this in school, nor do I know anyone who has. The closest was in 10th grade when my social studies teacher considered doing it to teach us economics or something. We never actually did though. Also there were more boys than girls in the class and he couldn’t figure what to to with the excess males (he jokingly suggested making us priests). 
How did your class/school deal with a skewed gender ratio?
I had an egg. Colored a face on it and everything. It survived.
My egg was removed by protective services. It subsequently took out a restraining order on me. I couldn’t come within 500 feet of any omelettes, scrambles, or quiches.
Other. I assign it. Part of my semester-long Econ. class for high school seniors involves me “marrying” them off and having them undergo a simulation of the capriciousness of Life. We have fun with it, and every year I have students return to tell me how helpful it was in opening their eyes a bit to reality. They learn to budget, invest, and deal with limited resources. Then I regularly screw with them by making them draw from the Deck O’Disasters.
It’s a one day a week activity that lasts a semester. If anyone fails to budget for birth control and draws the pregnancy card, they have to carry a 5lb sack of flour to all their classes on activity day. This grows into a 10lb sack of rice after a few weeks.
silenus, you should give them a bag of flour/rice with a hole in it, so that the contents fall/leak out unpredictably and the bag needs to be refilled several times a day.
For some reason our year didn’t do the flour bag baby thing - everybody else did, though, before and after my class. (No marriage thing.) It was in eighth grade. If you lost your flour bag, you had to adopt a ten pound one.
ETA - I’m 30, so this would have been in the early 90’s.
I didn’t do it in school but I know some other kids in my class did (class of '97). I think they may have done it through home ec.
When I was in 10th grade, my school instituted a health class for incoming 9th graders. It had a sex ed component where they did have to do the doll thing, but because the requirement was not retroactive, I never had to do it myself. This would have been in the early to mid-90s.
My school had an elective parenting class that assigned Baby Think-it-Overs. I never took the class - my father had a tough enough time with me taking music each year, I think if I dropped chemistry in favour of parenting he would have killed me.
All I remember is that the band teacher jokingly touched a friend’s baby and it registered as a slap and she lost points.
nope. I don’t know if my school didn’t do it at all, or if it was part of a class I didn’t take, but I didn’t have to do it.
too bad, I guess, it would have been the closest thing to a “date” I’ve ever had…
I was the assigned husband to the most beautiful cheerleader in school, who was a good sport about it, considering my station as class lowlife. We were issued a sprouting houseplant as a “baby,” which quickly developed a twin sister, which the teacher discovered but was also cool with. It was a more accepting era.
silenus, what do you do if your class doesn’t have an equal number of boys & girls? Do you let students pick their “spouses” or are these “arranged marriages”?
I clicked yes, but actually it was in about 7th grade, not in high school. About 1987 or 1988.
We had to carry this goddamn 5lb bag of flour everywhere we went for about a week. (I’ll have you know mine was named Mookie, after 80’s-era Mets World Series Accidental Hero Mookie Wilson). It was a part of our sex-ed program and it was required.
I don’t remember us being pretend-married. The program was not about the difficulties of marriage. It was about what a pain in the ass a baby is.
I think in freshman or sophomore year we had Health class complete with gross STD slides and egg babies. I built a little padded crib and for him and stashed him in the back of my locker. I didn’t carry him around like I was supposed to. I drew a face on the punk too. I think one of my friends smashed him before the week was up.
I went to an all-male Catholic high school, so that would be a big “No”.
Arranged marriages only. I pair the students up by a complex algorithm that amounts to “What pairings will I find most amusing?” If we have an odd number of M/F pairings, then we have either some “roommate” arrangements, “heterosexual life partners” or what have you. Depends on what the involved kids want to call their arrangement. Most figure out quite quickly that if they call themselves a same-sex couple, they don’t have to budget for birth control and they are immune to the baby card. 
I went to an all male catholic high school as well. We did the baby-flour thing. It was pointless. Carry the thing for one week inbetween classes. During class put it under your desk. On your way home toss it in your schoolbag in case some a-hole teacher called you out before class (which rarely happened). Those flour bags were virtually indestructable.
Egg babies in 7th grade and 10-pound rice babies in 9th grade. We didn’t have partners. I think the idea was to scare us away from having babies in our teens, not so much about budgets and working with partners. We were pretend single parents and did not get to share the burden. Damn those things were heavy. The rice, not the egg. After I graduated they upgraded to robot babies that kept track how well you were taking care of them. I am sooo glad we missed those. My little sister’s doll used to wake up at 2:00 in the morning to be fed.
Did the baby thing in eleventh-grade health class (this was the late 90’s), it was mandatory.
Every single student in the 11th grade health classes were given (for a week) one of those fancy babies with a computer chip that would cry at random intervals*. You needed to turn the little <bleep> off by sticking a special pacifier in it’s mouth for a semi-random amount of time between 30 secs and 5 mins. This was supposed to simulate feeding it. There was also a chip inside that could tell if the baby was neglected (i.e. left in your locker so it cried for too long) or was shaken a lot. You’d fail if the baby registered abuse in any form.
It was the most annoying project ever, and definitely more so when the little “baby” would go off multiple times in the middle of the night. I, of course, got “lucky” and had the little <bleep bleep> right at the end of the school year during Prom, etc. The worst part was that I was tall, overweight and nerdy-as-heckfire, so the chances of me having a child in high school were pretty much nil. Mostly, it was a waste of time and a week’s sleep.
- Just for the record - the different sections of health classes rotated - the school had 10 or 12 babies and around 250 people in my grade. So pretty much every class for most of the school year was interrupted by a crying baby at least once a week.
Amusingly, we were told stories of a “crack baby” the school kept and only gave out to kids who were either in dire need of correction - or as a punishment device. This particular model of baby (looks like it still exists) would cry and then shake at intervals significantly more often than the “normal” babies. I don’t know anyone who was actually given the “crack baby” as their assignment, but we were always threatened with it (and for the record - we were shown that the baby exists. It was significantly thinner than the other models).
I did the mandatory baby assignment in 8th grade (flour sack) and 10th grade (mechanical doll that cried, and you had to ‘soothe’ by sticking and holding a key in its back. It could also record the amount of time you let it cry before taking care of it, and if you shook it, or dropped it). ETA: It was similar to the doll in Celidin’s link.
There was a marriage unit too, but it only lasted one day; long enough to make a budget.