Borrow A Baby ‘Baby Think It Over’ Lets A Potential Parent Experience Full Time Care Of An Infant

More life-like than Barbie, more fearsome than the Power Rangers, “Baby Think It Over” may be the only doll engineered to scare the daylights out of teenagers.

The doll is designed to dissuade kids from having kids by duplicating the most trying aspect of parenting: a wailing baby.

Sex educators are always looking for ways to show teens that having a baby isn’t as much fun as it looks. Often they send students home with baby simulators - a sack of flour or an egg - to care for 24 hours a day.

Now a California couple has devised a life-like doll that cries to be fed and protests when it isn’t positioned properly. “Baby Think It Over” is teaching teens all over the country what most parents already know: A baby will ruin your sleep and affect every aspect of your life.

At over 20 inches long and almost 7 pounds, the doll is designed to look like a newborn baby, complete with a wrinkled and shriveled-looking face, according to Mary Jurmain, whose husband - an out-of-work aerospace engineer - created the doll.

“We wanted the dolls to look real, so that teens carrying them around would get the same reaction they would get with a real baby,” said Jurmain, who is taking care of the marketing end of the San Diegobased business. “There’s a social stigma. People raise their eyebrows when they see a teen with a baby.”

The doll comes in dark- and lightskinned models, as well as an Asian model, according to Jurmain. So far, more than 1,000 have been sold, at $220 each, to clinics, schools and a few parents around the country.

The baby simulator cries at random intervals during the night and day, Jurmain said. Depending on which setting a teacher picks, the doll will cry every two to four hours, or as often as every five minutes if it is in sick-baby mode.

The doll’s wails are impossible to ignore, according to Jurmain. “It’s a very annoying cry,” she said. “It’s a recording of a real baby crying. The baby we used was somewhat distressed because nobody was picking it up. And it was a baby who was used to getting a lot of attention.”

Jurmain and her husband recorded just 10 seconds of the baby’s wails. “That one 10-second piece of crying is looped over and over again,” Jurmain said. “So unless it is attended to, the doll will cry until the battery wears down, and that could take all day.”

The baby-simulator will stop crying when it is “fed,” according to Jurmain. Students who take the doll home are given a key to plug into its electronics that will stop the wailing. But they must keep the key in for at least 20 minutes - the average time it would take to feed a real baby - or it will begin to cry again.

The key is attached to the student’s wrist with a hospital wristband so that he or she cannot get someone else to take care of feeding.

The doll also will cry if it is not fed lying on its back, or if it is not put on its side to sleep.

So what happens if the doll isn’t taken care of?

“There’s a set of lights in the electronics,” Jurmain said. “If the doll cries more than two minutes a yellow light goes on. If it cries for more than seven minutes, a red light goes on. And if the doll is dropped, a green light goes on.

“So, if the doll comes back to class at the end of the weekend looking like a Christmas tree, the student gets a very bad grade.”

“Baby Think It Over” isn’t exactly making a hit with the teens who have gotten to know it.

“They’re always glad to give the doll back,” said Jean Pickus, community health director for the Southern Indian Health Council, a clinic in Alpine, Calif., that uses the doll both to discourage young women from becoming pregnant and to educate young women who are expecting.

Pickus sends students home with the doll, a stroller, a car seat and a diaper bag. “They always come back early with the baby,” she said. “They are amazed at how much work an infant is. They’re amazed to see how often every three hours comes, especially at night. They’re not used to being woken up at all hours of the night.”

Many of the teens Pickus works with “thought a baby would be fun and neat and that everybody would give them lots of attention. Now they see that it’s a lot of work,” she said.

The doll is especially effective because of its voice, according to Pickus.

“It has a cry that could peel the paint off a wall,” Pickus said. “And somehow it always seems louder in the middle of the night.”

Pickus said the first teen she gave the doll to was her son. “I gave it to him for one night,” she said. “The next day he said to me, ‘Well Mom, you’re never going to have grandkids now.”’

For more information about “Baby Think it Over,” call 619-268-7973.

ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo