Common knowledge around Westwood Regional High School is that during your senior year health class, you will receive a robot baby to take care of for 24 hours. This project is meant to simulate a “real-life” experience of having an infant.
The RealCare baby cries, coos, and whines like a real baby. You will need to feed, burp, rock, and change the baby’s diaper.
The baby has three different settings, easy, medium, and hard. Your health teacher randomly picks a setting and during the 24 hours, everything with the baby will be recorded including what you will record on a paper sheet.
I conducted my baby project on February 25, and having the baby during that 24-hour period was extremely inconvenient.
First off, for the entire day, I had to carry around a huge baby car seat everywhere on top of having my heavy backpack and a constant worry that someone or something would bump my baby hard and it would start crying.
During lessons, the baby would cry and I would need to leave class and care for it. then By the time the baby was done crying, half of the lesson was already over, which made me fall behind in my classwork.
Throughout the day whenever I had to go somewhere in my car, I would have to maneuver the baby car seat into the car and then buckle the baby in safely to prevent it from moving around while I was driving. This made a simple trip to the grocery store much more inconvenient and difficult than just getting into my car and driving away.
The baby cried multiple times throughout the night so I could barely sleep and arrived at school the next day tired and unable to focus on anything except how I couldn’t wait for school to be over so I could go home and take a nap.
Overall, it was one of the worst experiences ever with the lack of convenience and zero sleep. I couldn’t wait for it to be over with. However, I do have to say that I learned a lot from this experience, getting to see first-hand the struggles of having a baby, doing simple daily tasks with it, and how much care a baby actually might need.
This 24-hour experience can be really difficult and annoying for teenagers who do a lot of after-school activities or have a job so I recommend for future students who do have a lot of out-of-school priorities to prepare in advance and see if they can free up their schedule for the baby.
There are “quiet time” hours available if you ask your health teacher, however, it is only for a short limited amount of time and available only for school-related activities, not work.