Just how to go about educating teens about sex and pregnancy has been a much-debated topic in schools across the globe.
And now a new study has raised fresh concerns about a popular sex education practice: giving teens “fake babies” (dolls) to help prevent pregnancy.
The idea behind the practice being, of course, that taking care of these dolls, feeding them and changing them and stopping them from crying, will be such a palaver that the girls entrusted with the dolls will be dying to hand them back – and put off having actual babies for a long, long time.
The dolls are designed to appear and behave like real babies, and Reality Works, the company that manufactures and distributes them, states that the program is meant to show teenagers “the physical, emotional, social, and financial consequences of becoming pregnant and dealing with parenthood.”
The only problem? An Australian study found that girls attending schools with “baby simulator programs” were actually “36 percent more likely to become pregnant by the time they’re 20 than those in schools that don’t,” Salon reported. Whoops.
In other words, taking care of fake babies only seemed to make the girls want an actual baby.
The trial involved roughly 2,800 female students from 57 schools, and it followed them from the age range of 13 to 15 until age 20. This is what Sally Brinkman, lead study author and associate professor at Telethon Kids Institute at University of Western Australia told ABC News:
“‘A lot of the teenagers become attached to their fake babies’ and it allows the administrators ‘to engage the teenagers,’ Brinkman said. “If they participated in the infant simulator program, teen girls were not only more likely to be pregnant, but also more likely to keep their pregnancies.”
