Flour baby, as part of an elective Child Development class.
Everyone bought theirs clothes and decorated it. My parents were too cheap to buy a baby outfit for a week, so I ended up wrapping mine in a cut-off pantyhose leg and drawing a face on it.
We did not have anything like this, and I am glad that my time was not wasted in a such a fashion.
Never had anything alike that in high school. I always thought it was a fictional trope of some sort, or something they might have done in California but not elsewhere.
Never did anything like that, nor heard of it done. We had classes that dealt with basic budgets and we had sex ed. Ours was rather extensive…our teacher was very well versed in contraceptives and would hand out anything that wasn’t a prescription if the students asked. She also offered to accompany anyone to the doctor if they needed a script for something and felt they had no one to support them. We snickered and made fun of her, but in hindsight, she was pretty awesome in terms of getting that information out to her students and doing everything in her power to ensure that kids were making good choices.
Considering in my graduating class we had FOUR pregnant girls, (this was 1980) it might have done some good, but I doubt it. Kids aren’t stupid and I doubt they take a sack of flour seriously, especially if they have any contact with a real little kid.
In the 70s it was considered a big deal to require one semester of home econ for the boys and and a semester of shop for the girls.
In my high school, all freshmen were required to take a semester of health class. The suckers who were assigned health class in the fall semester had to do the egg baby, but we spring-semesterites got off scot free. I didn’t need to take care of an egg for a week to know how much having a baby sucks anyway.
We had the egg baby assignment at my school on senior year, as part of a class called “Contemporary Living.” The week we took care of the egg baby was also pretend marriage week, and you were supposed to find an opposite-sex classmate to “marry” for the week and raise your egg babies together. Since four of us (me, 2 other girls, and one guy) were unable and/or unwilling to find spouses, the teacher put us all together in one “household” as single parents. I painted a face on that egg and carried it around all week, except for biology class - my biology teacher was an asshole who threatened to steal any eggs brought into his classroom. Fortunately one of the secretaries in the guidance counselor’s office was kind enough to egg-sit for me while I was in biology class that week.
Not in high school, it was an elementary school thing. And it was just the egg, not the marriage. I think the lesson was supposed to be “babies are a pain the ass. Avoid this until you’re an adult.”
Australia here.
My brother had to do it (around 1994ish) - it was compulsory at his school. He had a bag of flour
It wasn’t considered at my school. I would’ve refused to do it anyway.
Yeah, my school had the electronic baby dolls. Every sophomore had to take the class. We had maybe 50 kids in the class a semester, and only two of the electronic babies, so we only had the babies for one day and night. Or if you were really unlucky, the weekend (only a few kids had to do the weekends, and no one had it if it was a three day weekend or a holiday.) The really annoying part was that it used this little plastic key. It would start crying, and you’d insert the key into its back and turn the key, and then hold the key in place until it gave the signal it was “done.” This would take from three to ten minutes. But there was a spring that pushed back against the key, so if you let the key slip (oh, and the handle was smooth, round, plastic…so that happened a lot,) the timer would reset. Sucked when you were at like eight or nine minutes and it slipped and you’d have to start all over again.
We were the first class to use them (this was in 1998.) Everyone else before me (for at least fifteen or so years before me) had either a flour baby, or if you wanted you could use a doll, but you had to put weights in it’s clothes or something to make it at least five pounds. They had to do it a whole week.
This pretty much to a T. Except I’m 29. No marriage thing, but all of the classes before mine and all of the classes after had to do the flour thing. I guess I just got lucky because everyone bitched endlessly about having to lug those things around And rumor had it the teacher used to make a small pin prick in the bottom of each one. Too small to actually leak flour if you treated it well, but if you chucked it around, the thing would start to gush and you failed.
If I were a teacher, I think I’d just screen the flour bag baby episode of Frasier and be done with it.
I graduated in 1998, and I sort of vaguely remember that there was a child development elective. I don’t remember anyone carrying dolls or bags of flour around the hallways, though, so I don’t think that was part of it.
We had a full-on sex ed program though… condoms on bananas, silicone breasts and testicles to find lumps in, and slides of diseased genitalia. They showed us pictures of mangled bodies in driver’s ed, too.
Aahh, Red Asphalt III.
Wow, this thread is CRAZY to me!
Class of 2004, and definitely didn’t have a pretend baby assignment, and we were solidly middle to upper middle class high school, so the money was there. I thought this sort of thing was common 30 years ago, but not recently. Seems like it is. Also seems like a good idea, if it’s a computerized baby and all that.
We DID have an extremely comprehensive sex ed education during health class. We had rubber balls and rubber breasts and had to find all the lumps (and diagram them onto a sheet of paper) for credit. We had a fantastic teacher, who had few hangups about sex (I think she was a lesbian, and it somehow made her immune to the usual weirdness the topic brings about). We saw slideshows of various STD’s and were tested on how to contract them and which were curable and which were incurable and what could happen if some were left untreated She did the condom on a banana even though she said it wasn’t in the curriculum, she felt it was extremely important (I’m surprised she didn’t get in trouble for this). There was no abstinence training, and she did make some cogent points that aren’t typically brought up (if you sleep with someone, you are tacitly acknowledging that you may become tethered to them for 18 years; ask to see an STD test before sleeping with someone (something I did and was common among friends in college)).
Egg baby, 2002ish, I marked that we did the marriage thing too but I think we all just joked that we were married during the egg assignment.
We just drew names so there were lots of same sex couples and one threesome.
We carried a doll around for a week in middle school as part of Home Ec. It wasn’t overly educational as I’d already been carrying a purse around and a doll isn’t much more than that. I really wanted one of those mechanical babies that woke up in the middle of the night and had to be held properly and such but our school district didn’t have the money for that.
Damn it! I misvoted! I meant the EggBaby thing…this psycho chick I liked broke it.
I never had to do any of that stuff, I think because I moved and went to different high schools, and I think I somehow missed it.
In one school I remember some kids, not in my year, that had to do the egg-baby project.
I think it was a failed experiment because guys who were not in the health class (or whatever it was) usually ended up kidnapping someone’s egg for extortion and the baby ended up scrambled. I only saw it the one year.
I’m really curious to hear who what was the earliest year somebody here recalls having to do this. Because, as I mentioned in my post, when I went to high school in the late 70s, not only did we not do this, we had not even heard of this. I don’t think I had heard of any class anywhere doing this until sometime in the 80s.