Robot baby doll programmes may up teen pregnancy

The challenge with these doll-based programs, Taylor says, is that teens carry the simulated babies for a short period of time. But for top-of-the-line baby simulators, there’s no substitute for the RealCare Baby 3, a crying, burping, pooping, and often hungry robotic entity created to show teens what taking care of a little kid is really like.

The numbers don’t look good: 8 percent of the girls who received the dolls had at least one baby by 20, compared to 4 percent of the control group.

The baby simulator study was published in the journal, The Lancet.

The new study included 57 schools in Western Australia.

FILE – Teenage girls practice on in their classroom the handling of a newborn baby with a baby-simulation-doll. They can cry and burp and require diapering, feeding and care throughout the day and night.

The simulators – which are created to cry like infants and require a caretaker to feed, burp and rock them – are given to teenagers to teach them about the difficulties of parenthood. Likewise, is it any shock that here in the USA, the states with abstinence-only sex education have the highest teen pregnancy rates? The students also watched a video documentary featuring teen moms talking about their personal experiences.

“‘A lot of the teenagers become attached to their fake babies” and it allows the administrators “to engage the teenagers, ‘ Brinkman said”.

Brinkman said “we don’t know why the program failed” but said it could have been due tot he fact that students only had the babies for one weekend as opposed to one week.

She also noted another missing piece of the puzzle: the girls in the study could have had a lot of experiences after the pregnancy prevention program was over that influenced their choices, and those didn’t appear to be taken into account, she said.

But the programme did not present teen pregnancy in a positive light.

“We definitely were not saying you can’t become a teenage mother”.

In a statement sent to ABC News Reality Works CEO said the program studied was far different than what they recommended.

Australia ranks sixth out of 21 countries ranked by teenage pregnancy rates, according to the OECD. Sometimes the impact of even the most effective sex health curriculum can wear off years later, he says. Unfortunately, the Virtual Infant Parenting programme did not work in Western Australia.

The Mail Online provides the most accurate summary of the study, with a useful overview of the history of use of infant simulator programmes by local authorities in the United Kingdom, such as Birmingham, West Sussex and South Yorkshire. “Similar [programs] are increasingly being offered in schools around the world, and evidence now suggests they do not have the desired long-term effect of reducing teenage pregnancy”.

The simulators were now used by more than 40,000 institutions worldwide, he said.

And as for why the dolls got such enthusiastic uptake in the first place, Julie Quinlivan, professor of obstetrics of University of Notre Dame Australia, writes in an associated editorial that politicians were seduced by a technological solution to a societal problem. With this project, the information centre for pregnancy, family and sexuality wants to avoid unwanted teenager pregnancies and tries to create an awareness for the responsibility of a child within adolescents.