Crying ‘Baby’ Wakens Teens To Parental Reality

Cassie Claybrooks learned the hard way what it’s like to be a parent.

Two weekends ago, she was one of the first in her class at Sacajawea Middle School to take home a baby.

“It was OK,” she said. “Especially knowing you can give it back in a few days.”

Cassie’s baby, while capable of putting up quite a loud fuss, wasn’t your typical infant.

Students in Sacajawea’s Quest program are getting a taste of parenthood through Baby Think It Over, a national program designed to help teens explore the emotional and financial consequences of becoming parents.

“We want to teach these kids what it’s like to have kids,” said Mark Lishner, a teacher in the Quest program, aimed at students who aren’t thriving in a typical classroom setting.

About 10 Quest students will take home the babies - high-tech dolls that cry at random intervals with the help of a computer chip.

Students must respond to the high-pitched wails within a minute by turning a key in the baby’s back and holding it in place until the baby signals it is content. These “care sessions” can last from 5 to 35 minutes.

Other rules apply, too: Students are required to change the baby’s diapers after every care session. If they need to leave the baby, they must make child-care arrangements and pay the baby sitter.

If Baby is in a car, it must be strapped in correctly to a car seat.

Pediatrics students at Spokane’s Intercollegiate Center for Nursing Education are working on the project at Quest. Havermale and Medicine Wheel, two other District 81 alternative education programs, are also involved.

The reality check began with a visit to Shopko to price baby items, from furniture to Q-tips. Just the essentials came to nearly $1,000.

Quest students also took a look at real hospital bills from a birth and are simulating a paternity suit as part of their law studies.

“We would like to give teens a lesson in what single parenting is all about,” said Gudrun Klim, a nurse and ICNE instructor overseeing the program.

Fourteen-year-old Cassie thinks she learned that lesson well. She spent the whole weekend caring for her “son” while equipped with diapers, bottles, clothing and a car seat. On the day before she was to begin her care, Cassie was optimistic.

“I think it’ll be fun,” she said. “I like babies, so I’ll get used to it.”

She admitted afterward the baby was a little more reality than she’d anticipated.

Her journal entries over the weekend showed a cycle of emotions. Once, when the baby cried, she wrote she was glad to hear him. Another time, when he cried Friday night while Cassie was at the State B basketball tournament, she was embarrassed.

When the baby woke her twice in the middle of the night for care sessions, she wrote, “Mad and tired.”

The baby cried in the car, at the grocery store when she and her sister stopped to buy pop, and Monday morning as she tried to do her hair for school. Cassie arrived at school Monday with just one hand’s fingernails painted. She was too busy with Baby to finish the job.

“There were a few times I had to tell myself, ‘It’s just a doll,”’ she said with a laugh.

Normally a computer chip in the baby’s back tells coordinators how the baby was treated over the weekend. The batteries were inadvertently removed too soon from Cassie’s baby, so the information was erased.

But Cassie said she knew she’d done a good job. She also admitted to a bit of fatigue.

“I’m not too tired,” she ventured. “But if someone offered me a bed. …”

Sillia Lockridge, also 14, played parent this past weekend. She may have gotten an A on the assignment, but by Monday morning she was ready to give Baby back.

“It wasn’t very fun,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be that hard.”

Lockridge’s baby cried eight times on Saturday, including twice in the wee hours of morning.

One of her most frustrating moments, she said, came on Sunday while she was bowling.

“Every time I tried to bowl it would start to cry,” she said. “I barely finished the game, and I lost.”

Lockridge’s mother, Diane Franklin, applauded the school’s decision to use the Baby Think It Over program, saying it changed her daughter’s attitude toward parenting.

“It was a good idea,” she said. “She likes babies, but she’d never actually be the one to be up with it at 2:30 in the morning till now.”

Before the weekend, Lockridge said she’d be prepared to have a baby at age 19.

“I think I’m going to change that,” she said with a laugh. Her new goal is to wait until 22.

Claybrooks said she could take the baby on again, but she still sticks by her original goal to wait to have children until she’s 25.

“It does show how much time it takes to care for a baby,” she said. “It makes you think before you go off and have kids.”

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