It's 4:16 a.m., and I am so tired.

I've been feeding my baby daughter her bottle for the past 10 minutes and she is showing no signs of finishing. I'm doing an awful job of staying awake but every time the tip of the bottle moves at all, she lets out a screeching wail that can be heard all over my house.

My little "daughter"
Photo by Emma Lincoln Pattee

After about five more minutes, she is done drinking. I put her back in her cradle, and, with a sigh of relief, lie back on the bed. She starts crying again. I pick her up and start checking for what's wrong. I offer her the bottle; she continues to cry. I take her diaper off; still crying. I start desperately patting her back and rocking her.

Then I accidentally let her head fall back and she starts screaming—a hysterical, gut-wrenching sound that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. I am neurotically talking out loud to her and trying to soothe her, but nothing is working.

By the time she is done yowling and I have burped her, re-fed her, and changed her diaper, it is 5:02am. As I fall back asleep, I realize, with horror, that I still have two days and two nights left before I give my baby back.

Almost Real

Give her back? Yes. My little "daughter" isn't actually a real baby. She is a highly sophisticated plastic doll, known as Baby Think It Over, that is designed to give teens a chance to "try out" young parenthood, and be confronted realistically with some of its challenges and responsibilities.

Baby Think It Over is used in sex education classes worldwide. In my local high school, 300 freshmen will spend a (long!) weekend caring for the baby as part of a mandatory health class. The goal, of course, is to get these teenagers to think about the potential consequences of their sexual behavior by giving them a realistic experience of caring for a baby.

The "baby" is an anatomically correct version of a three-month-old. A computer causes the doll to cry at random intervals to simulate the demands of a real baby to be fed, changed, burped, etc. The "parent's" performance in caring for the baby is recorded and downloaded when the baby is returned, so the students can see how well they did.

Can It Work?

Although the doll is extremely realistic in many ways, is it actually realistic to think that a plastic baby-doll can affect teens' sexual behavior? I asked Mark Schoenleber, a teacher at my high school, what he thought. He said he wasn't sure it the doll would "curtail sexual activity," but that it would make them think about the potential "byproduct" of unprotected sex.

"In other words, having a baby is kind of a drag for kids: they come to school, they're tired because the babies kept them up all night. These teens are having to be responsible for something. I think it does a great job of putting some of that responsibility out," Schoenleber says. "It's a hands-on project, and hopefully it makes kids more aware about protection and having safe sex."

Not Real Enough

But one 17-year-old girl who participated in the program disagrees.

"I don't think it helps teens become more responsible because it's nothing like a real baby. A real baby gives you happiness. This is a plastic little doll that cries all the time—that's all it does, it doesn't shut up ever. When I think of having a baby, the Baby Think It Over is not what comes to my head," she says.

Like this girl, most teens I interviewed thought the program wasn't useful, because the experience is unrealistic since they have no parental bond with the baby. A few said that since they had young siblings to care for, they already knew what it was like to have a baby, and didn't need the extra reminder. Some teens refused to go through the program because they didn't think it was fair to show only a "dark side" of having a baby.

Yet those kinds of negative responses could be the exact thing that schools are hoping to achieve by sending students through this program.

Ups and Downs

When I first got my Baby Think It Over, I was really excited. Even though I expected my weekend to be awful, there was something about hearing my baby cry and knowing that I was the only one who could make it stop that made me feel responsible.

By the time I returned the baby, however, I was exhausted and cranky. Yet I had also grown attached to the small (but noisy) doll, and I have to admit, I almost cried when I said goodbye.

But my attachment doesn't mean that I "failed" the program. It helped me understand how maternal I am, and in the future, the program might be a factor in my decisions about parenthood. I still had one crazy and tiring weekend, of course, full of screaming, bottle-feeding, and diaper-changing, and it made me understand just how huge a commitment having a baby really is.

One Small Difference

More than one million teens have been sent home with Baby Think It Over since the doll was invented in 1993. That was around when the teen pregnancy rate in America reached a record high. In the decade since, teenage pregnancies have fallen by nearly one-third.

But it's hard to say just how much the Baby Think It Over program has contributed to that decline. Statistical research on the program has been mixed, though some schools and teachers who have used the infant simulator reported teen pregnancy reductions of up to 50 percent in their communities.

Even if it affects one percent of those teens, that would mean the Baby Think It Over program could discourage three teens at my school from possibly becoming teen parents every year. When you think of the effect a baby would have on the lives of those teens and their families, that's a big impact. For some kids, the Baby Think It Over program could be a life-changing weekend.

National correspondent Emma Lincoln Pattee lives in Oregon.