Skip to main content

Baby simulation dolls may boost teen pregnancy: study

infantIt’s a popular teen pregnancy prevention tool used in high schools in at least 89 countries: send students home with a crying, pooping, burping doll to teach them first-hand lessons of early parenthood.
    But a surprising new Australian study has found that infant simulation dolls may actually increase the likelihood of pregnancy among teenage girls, not lessen it.
    The research, published Wednesday in The Lancet, studied more than 1,000 teenage girls who went through Australia’s Virtual Infant Parenting (VIP) program, which is adapted from the U.S. program Reality Works – sometimes called the “baby think it over” program.The VIP program is an opt-in curriculum that touches on issues like smoking, drinking and drugs and includes an infant simulator that students take home for a weekend. The doll cries when it becomes “hungry” and requires students to rock it to sleep, change it and burp it. A small computer inside the doll also measures any mishandling, crying time and overall care.
    To gauge the program’s effectiveness, researchers compared 1,267 girls who went through the six-day VIP program to 1,567 girls who received a standardized health education curriculum. All participants were between 13 to 15 years old and lived in Western Australia at the start of the study.
    Researchers then tracked each participant until the age of 20 using data from hospital records and abortion clinics.
    The results showed that girls who cared for a baby simulator had higher rates of pregnancy and abortion than those who did not. About 8 per cent of girls in the VIP program (97 girls in total) had at least one birth by 20, versus 4 per cent (67 girls) in the control group.
    A similar discrepancy was found in abortions. About 9 per cent (113 girls) in the VIP program had an abortion compared to 6 per cent (101 girls) in the control group.
    The study’s lead author said these results are a warning sign for educators using the dolls.
    “Similar programmes are increasingly being offered in schools around the world, and evidence now suggests they do not have the desired long-term effect of reducing teenage pregnancy,” wrote Dr Sally Brinkman of the University of Western Australia in a statement. “These interventions are likely to be an ineffective use of public resources for pregnancy prevention."
    The authors pointed out that, while the study considered a large sample of teenage girls, the rate of participation in the study hovered around 50 per cent.
    Researchers also highlighted that the VIP program is voluntary in Australia, and that girls in the control group had a higher average socio-economic status than those in the VIP program. However, researchers say these factors did not change the results.
    The study has been called the first randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of infant simulation dolls.

      Popular posts from this blog

      Photos from Delta state's cultural parade

      Delta state is celebrating its 25 years of existence and as part of activities for the celebration, the state government today organized a cultural parade which took place at the Cenotaph, Asaba. See More photos below.

      Again, why TINUBU must rescue Nigerians from BUHARI, Africa's new Niccolo Machiavelli

      There is no denying the fact that bad economic and foreign policies can precipitate serious crises like such we experience today in Nigeria capable of sparking off dangerous political consequences thus making politicians demand arbitrary power to deal with emergency situations caused by bad government policies. When times are bad many people have no option but are often too willing to go along and support terrible things that would be unthinkable in good times. In Nigeria, for instance, we have had dictators in military garbs and it took us years of dogged fighting, dingdong struggles, and battles to return the country from military dictatorship to constitutional democracy like such Nigerians enjoyed in the past one and half decades ago. Prior to the freedom that held sway in the past 16 years of Nigeria's civil democratic rule, Nigerians languished under the jackboot of the military that saw the emergence of many pro-democracy groups, the most vibrant of all being the...

      Are we supposed to be afraid of God?

      JimsBlog Posts from the Pastor of Richmond's First Baptist Chu Skip to content BY  JIM SOMERVILL    Sunday’s sermon touched on some questions I’ve been getting in “Talkback,” my weekly question-and-answer sessions with First Baptist Church’s adult Sunday school classes.  This excerpt deals with one of those questions. Sometimes, in my Talkback sessions, someone will ask about that biblical expression, “the fear of the Lord.”  “Are we supposed to be afraid of God?” they ask.  No.  That’s not what the word  fear  means, not in that context.  It means something more like “awe,” or “reverence,” or “profound respect.”  But you can see where the word came from, can’t you?  From an experience like this one at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19): where Moses went up to receive the Ten Commandments and the people trembled in fear before the mountain of the Lord.  And when the writer of Proverbs said, “The fear of the Lord i...