At FHN, a class called Child Development is offered as an elective to students. There are three different levels of the class which take up a semester each. A different stage of child growth is taught in detail during each one.
While in child development one, students are given the opportunity to do the baby project. This project simulates a newborn baby’s needs for four days. The baby will cry, need a diaper change, need to be fed, and more.
“It’s just what happens to new parents over the course of a few months, but in just one weekend,” Said Sarah White, the child development teacher of 13 years.
While she explains what she loves most about what the babies do, White also mentions why they are great for students and their perception of parenthood.
“My favorite part about these babies is how the kids go through a version of the new parent emotional spectrum in one weekend,” White said. “ Like they are excited, they are anxious, they are nervous, they are over the moon, they are overwhelmed, they settle in, and then they are really sad to give the babies back because they have bonded with them after a long weekend.”
The recent change from the old FHN building, to the brand new one, sparked a reason to get brand new babies after 7 years of using the same ones.
“We didn’t get new babies because of the new school,” White said, “just like any other kind of computer, every so often they need to be replaced, they start to slow down, they just start to not be as effective.”
White comments that the old babies were like an old cell phone. The new generation of the phone arrives and it does many things better than the one you own.
“The old program was lacking things, in the way that she (Sarah White) didn’t know if people were treating the babies badly, like there were bad things people were doing to the babies that she had no way of knowing about, and now she has a way to know,” Gabrielle Hausladen, [a junior/ senior] who took child development one during her freshman year said. “The new babies have a bunch of new sensors that let her know things she couldn’t before.”
White says the new babies are the same previous model, just a new and improved copy.
“Having a fresh set of babies is lovely because they are doing more of what we would expect them to do, I just love the data that the sensors in these new babies provide,” White said. “Iit tells me what outfit the baby was wearing, how much time it was crying for, what temperature it was at, how much time the baby spent in the car seat, the data is really awesome and helps facilitate good conversations with the students.”
