The baby dolls kick and cry, need to be fed and burped, and nursed even in the middle of the night. Trying out the full-time job of motherhood should scare teen girls out of getting pregnant, right?
Baby simulator programs offered in high schools are supposed to teach teen girls about the responsibilities of parenting. While the tool is meant to decrease teen pregnancy, new research suggests these dolls may make teen girls more likely to get pregnant.
Scientists out of the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia are now warning health and education officials that the intervention could be backfiring altogether.
“Our study shows that the pregnancy prevention program delivered in Western Australia, which involves an infant simulator, does not reduce the risk of pregnancy in teenage girls. In fact, the risk of pregnancy is actually increased compared to girls who didn’t take part in the intervention,” Dr. Sally Brinkman, of Adelaide-based university, said in a statement.
“Similar programs 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. These interventions are likely to be an ineffective use of public resources for pregnancy prevention,” Brinkman said.
READ MORE: MTV’s ’16 & Pregnant’ may have halted teen pregnancy rate
Brinkman and her team decided to zero in on Australia’s Virtual Infant Parenting (VIP) program that was adapted from the U.S.’ Baby Think It Over tool.
The programs are doled out in high schools, teaching kids about a healthy pregnancy, the financial burden of having a baby, sex health and birth control, along with meeting with teen moms who share their experiences. After that, the students are left to tend after a baby doll that cries when it is hungry, needs to be burped, rocked and changed.
The program is used in 89 countries even though there’s no “robust evidence” that it actually helps to curb teen pregnancy, the researchers noted.
Brinkman and her team worked with 57 Western Australian schools – some had the VIP program while others had standard health education. Then, the scientists looked at hospital records and abortion clinic data for 13 to 15-year-old girls at the start of the study until they were about 20 years old.
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Turns out, girls in the VIP group had higher rates of pregnancy and abortion compared to their peers.
While baby dolls may not be as effective, TV shows may inadvertently help the cause.
In 2014, University of Maryland scientists suggested that MTV’s hit reality show, 16 & Pregnant, may have helped to prevent thousands of teenage pregnancies.
“We find that 16 and Pregnant led to more searches and tweets regarding birth control and abortion and ultimately led to a 5.7 per cent reduction in teen births in the 18 months following its introduction,” lead authors Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine said in their study.
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The New York Times pegged the 5.7 per cent reduction to a possible 20,000 teenage pregnancies.
At first, critics said shows like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom would glamorize teen motherhood to young women.
But Kearney and Levine studied birth records and television ratings to find that teen pregnancies were lowest in areas where teens were watching the most MTV.
READ MORE: What older moms and teenage pregnancy say about opportunity in Ontario
While looking at Google data, they noticed “striking spikes” in searches on how to get birth control on the days when episodes would air.
Brinkman’s full findings were published in The Lancet. Read the full findings.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
Follow @Carmen_Chai
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