Child Psychology students learn what life is like for new parents

The high-pitched wailing of a newborn baby fills Kristin Thomson’s classroom, interrupting her third-period AP Environmental Science lecture. Everyone laughs as the baby’s caretaker tries to quiet her.

The child belongs to junior Ashley Joshi. The baby is not just an advertisement for birth control, however. As part of Laressa Ridge’s child psychology class, Joshi must spend 48 hours taking care of this “robot baby,” as she calls them.

This annual project is the reason that every year students find several upperclassmen struggling to keep awake even more than usual. Ridge said the goal of the assignment is for students to get a feel for what it really takes to care for a newborn.

“It’s round-the-clock care that they have to give,” Ridge said. “I hope they will learn how much responsibility it really is [to care for a child].”

Joshi agrees that the baby is a lot of work. Despite the difficulties that the assignment presents, however, she said she enjoyed the experience.

“You don’t know what the baby’s crying for. It doesn’t tell you, ‘I want my food now’ or ‘I want to be changed now,” she said. “You just have to try until it works, and you feel really bad. The baby just keeps on crying, and you can’t figure out what it wants.”

Ridge said the response of students is varied.

“A lot of them are excited about it,” Ridge said. “Some of them do not react so positively, they think it’s gonna be a lot of fun, and they realize it was more work than they expected.”

Junior Wesley Sun said he enjoyed the project, despite the heavy workload. He believes that the student population is supportive toward the students with Child Psych babies.
“I was actually really excited to get the baby,” Sun said. “That’s the reason I joined Child Psych, to get to take care of the baby. When I saw it my freshman year, I thought, ‘Oh, I want to do that too.’”

So how does the project change students’ perspectives on parenthood? Joshi has new-found respect for her parents, knowing how difficult it is to raise a child.

“I feel so bad for new parents,” Joshi said. “Our babies are way easier to care for than real babies, because they don’t require as much interaction, and they’re quieter than a real baby would be.”

Joshi was thankful that her teachers and fellow classmates were accommodating. Despite the seemingly constant wailing that pervaded the halls, most students and teachers were open-minded and understanding towards the “parents” of the babies.

“No one really said anything about it, probably because they know it’s a fake baby,” said Joshi. “But they were nice about it and they would laugh with you when the baby started screaming in class and if they got irritated, they didn’t say anything.”

When Joshi’s baby, “Annie,” began screaming in Thomson’s classroom, everyone laughed along with her and Thomson even referred to her during her lecture on overpopulation. “She was laughing, the rest of the class was laughing, it was really nice,” Joshi said.