Thinking it over in practice

I am a big fan of Tom Chi’s notion of ‘rapid prototyping’—basically, if you are going to put months or years of effort into a project, try a quick pretend version as soon as possible. Often it is hard to forecast mentally what the real issues will be.

So, before I think more about whether to have children, I want to experiment with some quick pretend versions. Happily the US education system has a similar idea, so someone else has gone to the effort to make sort-of-realistic artificial babies, that cry, need changing, fail to sleep, burp, and so on. 

The US education system’s interest in this has less of a spirit of open-minded experimentation, since the people they are helping to assess parenthood are teenagers. I can tell the makers have a preferred conclusion, because the baby was called ‘Baby Think It Over’ until a recent version, and I don’t think they meant ‘rethink your low teenage fertility’. So maybe I should expect this to be designed to be an especially bad experience of child-rearing. 

On the other hand, in an experiment teenagers randomized into caring for virtual infants at school had children much more often, so I suppose the makers didn’t try too hard to make it unpleasant. And if it is actively encouraging in spite of being an unrealistically bad experience, that seems good to know.

So anyway, I’m going to rent one for the next week. It is meant to turn up in the mail today. I am inexplicably very excited. Realistic so far I suppose, in ways.

(ETA: there is more research, which the makers summarize as indicating that ‘the program offers a highly effective approach to preventing teenage pregnancies and teaching parenting skills’.)