Honolulu Lite
Babies are bundles
of work for teensMy 14-year-old daughter had a baby. Actually, she has a baby. Not a real one. A life-size plastic one that is supposed to smell like a real baby but smells more like a pair of new tennis shoes. Or a new basketball. Or something along the rubberized sports equipment line.
She has to pretend the baby is real and take care of it for a week. It's a school assignment. Freshmen girls at St. Andrew's Priory carry their "babies" to class, to lunch and anywhere else they go, mainly because you wouldn't just stick a real baby in a locker while you went to Chemistry or Math. Well, you could. But you shouldn't.
That's part of what the drill is about: To teach girls how much responsibility is involved in caring for a baby. The idea being, apparently, that if the girls knew how much time and effort is needed to care for a child, they'll make sure they don't have one accidentally before they are married and ready to raise a kid.
The teachers aren't pulling any punches here. The girls have to change their babies, feed them and carry them around in official motherly fashion, not hanging by their feet or slung over a shoulder like a sack of corn. And talk about home work. The girls have to get up in the middle of the night to "feed" the babies or change their diapers, just so they realize that child-rearing is not just a 9-to-5 job.
In addition, the girls have to interview their parents to find out what effect becoming a teen mom would have on their futures. Of course we told our daughter we would be supportive of the new addition but it would mean she'd have to go to a community college instead of a mainland university and get a job, to boot. I think the job part scared her more than the idea of changing diapers.
WHEN I FIRST heard about the baby exercise, I thought it was a bit extreme. The idea of a bunch of girls walking around the school holding plastic babies that smell like basketballs seems kind of weird. But then I thought about how little effort is put into teaching our teens that there is more to having a baby then just having a baby. Most teen pregnancies are accidents but so are most car crashes. There are about 4,200 rules and laws designed to keep people from having automobile accidents, but how many families actually sit down and talk about the impact of a teenager accidentally bringing a child into the world?
I don't know if other schools have similar Baby Awareness exercises but they should. And boys should also be forced to carry around the stunt child for a week also, so they learn being a man and being a father are two different things. It takes only a few seconds to prove you're a man, but a lifetime to prove you're a father.
A side benefit to the baby project is that I think my daughter appreciates a little more what my wife and I went through raising her. I've told her how I walked a furrow in the living room floor at 3 a.m. many a night trying to get her to sleep. Until now, she thought the story was quaint and theoretical.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com