Baby simulator shows teens the nitty-gritty of parenthood

Thursday, January 15, 2004

By Lell Wood

My weekend assignment is to supply one word to describe how I would feel about my daughter becoming a parent at age 16. She has already chosen "scared." My husband opted for "disappointed."

	Cathy Tigano Gianella, Post-Gazette

"That thing is just spooky," he says whenever our baby-sized plastic weekend guest comes into his field of vision.

Not a coincidence. The Baby Think It Over program's mission is to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy by giving would-be teenage parents cause to think twice before getting pregnant.

RealCare Baby is not a doll but, rather, a computerized infant simulator. Not a toy but "a serious educational tool," an anatomically correct baby boy who is now crying at 3:45 a.m. Thirty-three hours and counting, and I can differentiate his cries. He's hungry.

"Oh, the joys of parenthood," sighs my mate as our daughter storms from her room to retrieve the identification bracelet she must activate before the simulated baby will consent to take a bottle. At 4:04 in the morning, a screaming baby is a screaming baby is a screaming baby.

As simulated sucking noises float from our daughter's room, I have to laugh. Last night, before going to bed, we watched the tape the Child Development teacher had tucked into the diaper bag.

"This is not fun, it wakes you up!" cries a videotaped participant in the program.

At 4:23 a.m., snoring resumes on my husband's side of the bed. Earlier in the evening, when the spooky baby that my husband suggested might "attack us in our sleep" started to fuss, he confided about wanting to pick it up to comfort it. I can't imagine how I would have coped with three real babies without the aid of what he used to call his "magic daddy hands."

I find myself thinking about a song my friends and I chanted while jumping rope as kids. The one about a boy and a girl sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes marriage, then the girl with a baby carriage.

4:30 a.m. finds me the sole survivor of the simulated baby's simulated feeding. I use the quiet to contemplate my unfinished assignment.

Coming up with only one word for how I would feel about my 16-year-old daughter becoming a mother is difficult.

To the program's credit, nothing about the Baby Think It Over experience is glamorized. This isn't a television baby who gets left alone in an apartment with a baby monitor, the way little Emma does when Rachel Green visits with her buddies across the hall on "Friends."

Baby Think It Over is coded with a real baby's birthright to take more than it gives. It cries to be changed, fed and burped. It screams if it's handled too roughly. And it has an uncanny need to be held just when you're sitting down to a meal. The baby's expressionless face is a foil to the cooing it makes when its caretaker comforts it successfully. You can't make it happy. Just quiet.

"Just take care of all of its holes for the first year," a psychiatrist friend horrified us by saying when we became parents. Two decades later, I understand. Comforting a baby by taking care of it responsibly is the cornerstone to building a healthy parent-child relationship.

This is where trust begins.

It's 6:11 a.m., and simulated baby should be cranking up again soon. I finally have my word, but it surprises me because I love my daughter unconditionally and am prepared to feel likewise about any baby she will bring into the world. But, were this to happen now, I would be sad.

The log of my kind and nurturing daughter's simulated mothering experience is fraught with words like "worried," "tired," "exasperated," "embarrassed," "interrupted" and "hungry." "Joy" never makes her list.

When she becomes a mother, first should come joy -- along with a good man with magic daddy hands to double that joy by staying at her side for the long haul.

Lell Wood is a freelance writer living in Mt. Lebanon.

Questions, comments or submissions? Contact Life Support editor Peter B. King at 412-263-1458, by mail at the Post-Gazette, 34 Boulevard of the Allies, Pittsburgh, 15222, or by e-mail at pking@ post-gazette.com.

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