Pictured above is a RealCare baby that is used for the baby care project. Students in the Human Growth and Development class had to take home these babies for a weekend and learn how to care for a baby’s needs. “I liked having a constant companion with me,” Lehman said. “I was never alone for more than two seconds because it was really loud and needed constant attention.” Photo by Julia Seiden

Her dark room is finally quiet as she starts to fall asleep. She can hear the flutter of her posters on her walls from the fan rapidly blowing air. She can hear her clock downstairs in the kitchen ticking away. She can hear her breathing slow as she slips into unconsciousness. All of a sudden, as her mind begins to unfold into pale colors and dreamy bliss, she’s jolted awake from a piercing siren. Frantically, she bolts upright, looks around and breathes a sigh of dread as she realizes that her “baby” needs to be fed again. 

The RealCare baby is an infant simulator used for projects and classes such as the baby care project in the Human Growth and Development class. Students get to sign up for a weekend to take this simulation home and tend to its needs like an actual baby. 

“I thought it was going to be really easy because I thought that it didn’t take that long to do [tend to needs],” junior Elia Reed said. “[I thought] it would cry and I would quickly do it [take care of it] and then it would sleep.”

Because the simulation mimics a real baby’s needs, it requires students to be up at night when the baby needs to be tended to. 

“Waking up was the worst part,” Reed said. “I was awake from 2 am to 4 am and I had to wake up again at 6 am. Everything else was honestly manageable, it’s just how much it cried at night.”

Some of the needs that the babies cry for are feeding, burping, rocking and diaper changing. Because the babies are on different care schedules, this project’s overall difficulty varied for some people.

“It was a lot more than I was expecting,” junior Charlie Lehman said. “It was stressful and the baby was really loud and it needed constant attention.”

For junior Cheyanne Avery, this project was not as hard for her as it was for other students. 

“Caring for the baby [I] didn’t really have to do much,” Avery said. “[I] just kept it in the carrier, rocked it in the carrier, and burped it in the carrier.”  

 Because it’s turned on all weekend, the baby can cry at any point and time. According to students, doing this project can be stressful and inconvenient.

“It’s such a hard assignment and it’s so exhausting having to do it,” Reed said. “You have to be up all night, you have to constantly stop what you are doing to take care of the baby, you have to completely pull over if the baby starts crying. It’s annoying and it’s just not fun.”

There are some mixed feelings about how accurate this project really is compared to taking care of an actual baby

“I think part of it was accurate but some of it was over exaggerated and some of it was under exaggerated,” junior Cheyanne Avery said. “You would never feed a baby for 40 minutes straight, you don’t have to rock it [for 40 minutes], and you don’t have to scan an ID.”

For Lehman, doing this project meant that she didn’t have a lot of alone time.

“I liked having a constant companion with me,” Lehman said. “I was never alone for more than two seconds because it was really loud and needed constant attention.” 

In addition to learning how to care for a real baby, there are also some positive aspects to this project according to Reed.

“Everywhere [I went] people would ask [me] about it and talk to [me],” Reed said. “It’s a good conversation starter. There would be multiple times where fast food workers would talk to me about the fact that there’s a baby in the passenger seat, and it was really just something cool to talk about.”