Have you asked yourself this week, “Why are so many people holding fake babies?”, well if you have, it is because of the Human Growth and Development class. 

Mrs. Rogers teaches the subject and has assigned her students to carry and care for a ten-pound baby doll or a flour bag dressed up as a baby from Oct. 17th-24th to perform a social experiment.

 Her students have the task of becoming parents for a week and have to act as parents do with real children. Students are required to feed, bathe, and change the fake baby as if they were alive, and to make sure these babies are taken care of, Rogers has given her students a packet called “My Baby Book”. 

The book consists of the experiment’s instructions and rules, the baby’s “birth certificate”, entry logs that are to be filled each hour with where the baby is, who the baby is with, and what they are doing.  The book also contains daily diary entries that ask how the students feel about the project. The book has to be filled out each day and on her class Canvas page, the students have to submit photos of them “caring” for the baby until the end of the experiment/assignment. 

Roger’s alerted teachers before the experiment was in motion to set up a designated area for the baby to play or rest,  just in case it was too distracting for others. Many of the teachers enjoy the assignment and play along by holding the baby and caring for them while students are doing their work. 

Even though caring for a bag of flour isn’t the same as caring for a real baby, it is a fun and interactive way to make students responsible for the week and ready for what parenthood could be like.