Babies
A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, the health office at the boarding school where I taught distributed babies to the grade 12s. The initiative was meant to prepare students for adult responsibilities. In more than 35 years of classroom teaching, I saw many attempts to revolutionize the curriculum, but I never saw anything with the promise of the babies.
I should make clear that the infants were electronic—five-pound bundles of plasticized raw potential, complete with internal circuit boards programmed to launch random crying jags. To quiet the child—in class, during lunch, in the night—students employed one of four plastic keys. “When the infant cries,” the instruction manual explained, “the student must figure out which key (burping, feeding, attention, or diaper change) stops the crying.” In response to the appropriate key, the baby would sometimes coo. “There’s also a panic key that students use if they can’t figure out which key to use,” the manual noted.
The panic function made me think back to the guttural cries of my own children and the helpless expressions of my wife and me as we tried to settle their wailing. We looped through our retinue of responses—food, burping/fart-physio, cuddles, diaper-checks, and play—until something worked. It would not have been manageable for the infant simulators to howl the way real children sometimes do, but maybe the software should have allowed the babies to be inconsolable for at least one 30-minute period. There is a sense of helplessness that only a child can teach us.
The students were cautioned against attempts to re-program their infant or to bypass its needs. “Lights on the doll signal any attempt to tamper with the baby’s control panel,” the instructions warned. I’m not sure this was realistic. My experience as a son, teacher, and parent has taught me that many of us spend a great deal of time tampering with our children’s control panels.
The day the baby program was introduced to the grade 12s, a girl stormed into my classroom, dropped her books on the desk, and proclaimed, “This is so stupid! I’m not doing it!” When I asked what had set her off, she let out an exasperated sigh. In one breath she said, “We have to look after a stupid baby for two days and be married to someone and have, like, no freedom and take it with us everywhere and deal with it if it cries—even if we’re doing something! Even if we’re, like, sleeping!”
I learned later the young woman was more concerned with her assigned mate than with the obligations of childcare. The counselling office paired the students into 48-hour partnerships for the purpose of the program. For two days, the couple shared responsibility for a plastic baby. This drove unnatural allies together in child-rearing. The couples separated late in the day, with each partner caring for the child through one full night. In this way, the school maintained moral propriety, though the necessary separation denied students the opportunity to experience the reality of 2:00 a.m. marital conflict. It did, however, provide a micro-view of single parenting.
Not everyone took their responsibilities seriously, of course. At the end of the lunch period one day in the spring, a veteran colleague was outraged by the behaviour of some of our would-be parents. “Do you see what they’re doing?” he said from his position in front of a staffroom window. He lifted, then dropped his arms in confused indignation. He was a legendary teacher, grown more sensitive and fragile with age.
I joined him to look at the students on the grass in front of the building.
A mixed group of kids had gathered in a circle on the lawn. They were tossing two babies end-over-end across the open space between them. A couple of them doubled over in guffaws when the babies collided mid-air. Through the glass came the faint sound of baby cries.
I cringed and shook my head to indicate my disapproval, but my colleague missed the gesture. I turned to see him marching for the door. A minute later, he emerged from the front entrance of the building, strode onto the grass, and reprimanded the students. As I watched the kids lower their heads at the rebuke, it occurred to me that these students may have demonstrated better than anyone the aims of the program. Rather than earnestly pretending to care for a plastic baby, they made it clear they had no business raising children.
On the ferry to the mainland one day, I experienced an awkward baby-moment of my own. I had been invited to speak to a group of parents and students, and I was so taken with the Infant Simulators that I packed one into my small suitcase for show and tell.
On the ferry, I found a quiet seat across from three octogenarians. Sunshine streamed through the ship’s big windows. My seat companions said little but smiled politely whenever I looked up from my book. Unfortunately, I had neglected to turn off the simulator. Halfway through the sailing, the baby started to wail. It was only in this context that I noticed how loud the thing was. The women’s eyes went wide with confusion. I stood and snatched up my overnight bag. “Kids!” I said, bolting for the men’s room.
*
“I think mine is having a crisis of faith,” a boy said in class one day as he fumbled with the plastic keys. “He seems more needy than usual.”
“Seriously,” said the girl beside him, “they should make older ones with that!”
“They do,” said someone in the next row. “They’re called friends.”
“Existentialist baby,” another boy said. “The keys could be responsibility and authenticity—” He looked up at me when he ran out of applicable nouns.
“Freedom and angst,” I said.
“Sisyphus baby,” said one of the brighter kids.
I flashed a grimace-smile.
The boy with the infant simulator sat looking tenderly at the doll, which was now cooing.
“Baby earth,” said a usually sullen girl at the back of the room. “Like a ball.” She cupped an imaginary sphere in front of her. “If you don’t meet its needs, it dies.”
“Or it could be a little you,” I said. These were ambitious students who fretted about admission to top-tier universities. I had encountered one of them a week earlier, crying at the foot of a stairwell because she did not gain entry to her first-choice school. She had scholarship money from two reputable institutions, plus a fistful of other offers. “The keys could be perspective, self-care, gratitude, acceptance.”
“Babies everywhere,” said someone else.
“They should have it so if you don’t find the right key, something bad happens to you.”
“Whoa!” said a boy in one corner, shaking his head. “That’s too real.”
I raised my brow and angled an ear his way to invite further explanation.
He shrugged, cautious. “There’s a lot of blame in my family.”
Just when the conversation was beginning to animate, one of the girls said, “I hope they kill it.”
The others stared at her.
“It’s boring,” she said.
“Explain.”
“It’s just so obvious. None of us are parents, but we don’t need simulators to know that when a baby cries, it needs a diaper, food, burping, or love.”
“I agree with everything you said,” I told her. “Except maybe love.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“I don’t think love is obvious to us.”
“Well,” she said, “it should be.”
The school ended the program after a single year. Many teachers and students found the imposition unnecessarily disruptive.
I think we abandoned our babies too quickly.
Some days my social media feed fills my morning with pictures of former students and their children—mothers with freshly swaddled infants in their arms; young fathers swinging toddlers on a patch of park grass in the sunshine; new families walking arm-in-arm-in-arm on the beach. Kids on boats and at yoga class and playing in the summer dust at a campsite.
The images of family life make me think of those plastic babies and the frustrations of senior students fumbling to quiet a plastic child. I think of the flustered young woman who told me, “We have to look after a stupid baby for two days and be married to someone and have, like, no freedom and take it with us everywhere and deal with it if it cries—even if we’re doing something!”
Like most teachers, I regularly confronted the age-old rhetorical student gripe: When am I ever gonna use this? Whatever the objections the baby program, irrelevance was never one of them.
