The Australian version is called the Virtual Infant Parenting (VIP) program and it’s this that the study is based on. However, researchers say these factors did not change the results.
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“Infant simulators”, to give the robo-babies their proper name, are anatomically correct dolls that require burping, feeding, rocking to sleep and produce Code Brown and Code Yellow alerts in their trousers.
Lifelike baby dolls that cry and are created to stop teenage pregnancies actually INCREASE the number of underage mums, suggests new research.
Brinkman said this is the first study to link actual medical and birth data to a study that evaluates the use of simulator dolls and its effect on teen pregnancies. And they don’t work.
Dr Brinkman said schools should stop using the VIP program.
The study got published in the journal The Lancet.
The Reality Works program, he said, is 14 hours of class time with “learning activities and a prolonged take home simulator experience”, while the Australian version studied was “a mere 2.5 hours” of class time.
That’s the idea. Turns out that, despite being used in 89 countries including Australia, there was never any statistical evidence they worked to reduce rates of pregnancy. “They got a lot of attention from family friends while they had the baby, and then there was the other extreme of some students who found it hard and did not engage at all”.
But at the end of the trial, the VIP programme had higher rates of pregnancy and abortion (8%), with 97 out of 1267 of the girls in the intervention group had at least one birth, compared to 4% (67/1567) in the control group.
57 schools were enrolled in the three-year trial and thousands of teens were involved, with half randomly assigned to take part in the VIP program, while others were used as control.
Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, with the division of Adolescent Medicine and the Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Department at Seattle Children’s Hospital, told CBS News that the study is impressive in size but it leaves questions, such as what type of feedback did the girls get when they completed the prevention course?
Young people need non-judgmental sex and relationships education and ready access to contraceptives, said Dr Rowe.
While the study does not explore the reasons behind the spike in teen pregnancies associated with the electronic infants, the study cites other smaller studies that suggest few girls believed caring for their own infant would be the same as caring for a simulated infant.
The baby simulators tend to attract a lot of attention, which might blunt the intended message and instead make having a baby seem attractive, Brinkman said.
The FPA (formerly Family Planning Association) and sexual health charity Brook said they had never heard of “dolls” being used in the United Kingdom as part of teenage pregnancy prevention programmes.
Researchers suggested the dolls that cost around £1,000 each are in fact a waste of money in terms of preventing underage sex and unwanted pregnancies.
While the researchers say this isn’t statistically significant, it does show girls exposed to the program were more likely to go through with the pregnancy.
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“It may be doing harm”.
