Ever wondered what it would be like to take care of a baby alone? In child development class, students get a chance to experience how to take care of a baby. Students are sent home with life-like mechanical babies that simulate the things a real baby would do. With the baby, there is a bag of supplies provided. It includes diapers, three fun outfits for the baby, a blanket, and a bottle. Each student gets a chance to take care of the baby for about fifteen hours. During the fifteen hours, students have to feed the baby, change its diaper, rock it to sleep, and care for the baby when it cries. Throughout this process, the babies cry a lot.  Students would log when the baby would cry and what the students were feeling during and when the baby started crying. This is what sophomore Audrey Massey feels: “Over the course of when I took care of the baby, I got really frustrated and tired. It felt like the baby wouldn’t shut up.” It can be a struggle to manage the amount of crying a baby does when students may have little prior experience. 

   During the time of taking care of the baby, students learned perseverance, patience, and responsibility. Students were faced with challenges such as the baby would cry every few minutes, and they had to find a way to calm it down. Rocking the baby to sleep helped calm the baby down and get it to stop crying. Even though taking care of a baby alone may seem like a struggle to the students, sophomore Savanna Herman says, “Definitely a learning experience and it was hard to meet the baby’s needs while also trying to meet my own.” This experience impacted students by giving them a real-life scenario of what babies do and how much time and dedication it takes. Being able to properly take care of a baby can be an important life skill for the future.