Child Development is a class that teaches kids all they need to know about having children.

“We go through pregnancy, the whole nine months, how it develops, labor and delivery, we watch live births, that usually scares them into waiting a little bit.” Child Development teacher Shannon Scibek said, “Then we talk about infants one month to one year, toddlers, pre-school age and a little bit of school age.”

In the class students participate in projects such as wearing a pregnancy suit all day and taking care of robot babies over the weekend.

“The purpose of the robot baby project is to really get the feeling of how mentally and emotionally exhausting having a newborn really is,” Scibek said. “I know with the robot babies they cry about 60 times within two days which isn’t necessarily normal but it’s truly to get that sense of how exhausting it is.”

The students had to take care of the babies in class and at home.

“Once it started to cry you just started panicking. You had a bag of your diaper and bottle, but if it kept crying you didn’t want it to cry,” sophomore Elaina Benson said, “So you would go through the bag trying to change to diaper while feeding it at the same time trying to see which it is. And [if] that’s not it you had to pick it up and burp it trying not to drop the head, so it was really stressful.”

The stress of this project changed the way Elaina thought about parenthood.

“I’m still a child, I guess when I thought about having a child I knew it was a responsibility but you don’t understand how much until you have a trial run,” she said.

Overall, Ms. Scibek believes Child Development is beneficial for all and teaches the students valuable lessons.

“It definitely helps them realize how stressful parenthood can be and how inconvenient having a child can be, you have to take them everywhere with you,” Scibek said.  “You can’t just leave them at home and hope they’ll be ok.”

Although the project is difficult her goal is for it to leave a positive impact on the students.

“I hope it teaches the students to really wait until they are truly prepared to have a child,” she said. “That’s really the purpose of the project, wait till you’re truly ready to have a baby.”