Robot babies teach a lesson to teens: Having kids is tough

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Andrea Martin del Campo, 16, is all smiles shortly after receiving a robot baby in her child development class at Saddleback High School. The infant is programmed to cry in certain intervals. After a night of interrupted sleep she was happy to return the robot to her teacher. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The word came down way back in September: Andrea Martin del Campo would be getting her baby, in a matter of weeks.

It wasn't a real baby, of course. It was a robot-baby, a mannequin that cries when it's hungry. Or wet, or cold, or just when it wants to be held.

Andrea was thrilled, though: She told her friends at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, and they treated her to a baby shower, “just so I can feel like a mom,” she said. They gave her gifts – a teddy bear, baby powder. Overjoyed, she showed them to her teacher, Charlotte Runyan.

“She came in and said, ‘Look at the presents I got! They're from my baby shower!'” Runyan said.

The teacher's heart sank at the prospect of another bright student becoming a statistic. Although teen birthrates have been plummeting in recent years, at the national, state and county level, Latina girls in Orange County ages 15-19 still give birth nearly six times more often than white girls, and nearly 21 times more often than Asian girls.

This is one reason Runyan has been using a new generation of baby simulators for the past three years. She hopes the complex machinery delivers a simple message: Having a child as a teenager changes one's life in ways that aren't yet imaginable. It's far better to wait until you're more mature and settled to start a family.

“I think most teenagers think, ‘Oh, babies are so cute and so sweet,'” Runyan said. “By sending them home with a doll like this that performs like a real baby, in some ways – not in every way, but in some ways – it's sort of a reality check. And they do come back to school going, ‘There's no way I would have a child now. I want to do too many things. It's heavy, and it was a lot more work than I thought it was going to be.'”


Andrea wasn't the only student who'd been looking forward to the delivery of the robot babies in Runyan's child development class. She was just the most excited, her classmates said.

On Wednesday of last week, the 29 teens, all seniors, walked into her classroom to see the five little cyborgs, wrapped up in their hooded jammies (pink for girls, blue for boys), set out in a row on a table near Runyan's desk. They lay there, glassy-eyed, while Runyan sat at her computer entering the information that would bring them to life.

One by one, Runyan distributed them, and the students gathered into groups. They passed the babies around, and there were many audible “awws” heard. But a few minutes later, like magic, the babies began emitting very realistic-sounding yowls and yelps. The groups of students became frenzied pit crews, changing tiny diapers and offering faux formula in bottles. The crying soon died down.

Runyan could only give out three babies to this class, saving the other two for next period. And since this was Wednesday, a staff-development day, all the periods were shorter, and so the bell was about to ring. Andrea was assigned a baby boy, nicknamed Alexander, and like a new mom, she smiled and couldn't stop smiling.

That feeling, a blend of shy pride and giddy happiness, kept up its surge into third and fourth period, even though Alexander started bawling just a few minutes into psych class. In dance class, Andrea had to find a way to stretch while holding onto him.

Fast-forward to Thursday morning: Andrea showed up to school bleary-eyed. Alexander had cried for hours the night before, then slept for a while, then woke up at 3 a.m. for an extra-long feeding. She got him back to sleep, then nodded off herself about 4. She rose again at 6, and her mom gave them a ride to school so she could make her 7 a.m. student-council meeting. Mom and baby would be companions through first period before she could thankfully return him to Runyan at 9.

The thrill was now officially gone.

“It was fun for a while, watching it sleep and stuff,” Andrea said. “But when you want to go to sleep and you can't because it's crying, it's hard.”



The teen birthrate has been dropping fast since peaking in the early 1990s, and the trend applies to all racial and ethnic groups. In 2002, 69.6 out of every 1,000 Orange County Latinas 15-19 gave birth, according to the county's 2013 Conditions of Children report. In 2011, that proportion had fallen to 39.7 out of 1,000. But that's far above the rate of blacks (13.2), whites (6.8) and Asians (1.9).

Santa Ana has the highest teen-birth rate among Orange County cities: 54.6. That means more than 1 out of every 19 teenage girls in the city are having a child. A variety of nonprofit groups and education programs have helped cut the rate and prevent many more pregnancies.

“Between the intermediates and high schools, we're incrementally doing a better job of focusing students on college and career readiness,” Saddleback High Principal Robert Laxton said. “If you want to have a family, you need to have a job and career and post-secondary training. Now high schools in Santa Ana are promoting science, technology, math, college and career readiness, and I think that really wasn't present five to six years ago.”

Runyan, 61, started the child-development class at Saddleback, where she's in her 26th year as a teacher. She also teaches a foods class. She knows firsthand how difficult it is to raise a child on one's own: She was divorced at 27, when she had two boys – one a newborn, the other 2.

“I try to tell my students: It is not easy being a single parent. I was a single parent for five years. I had a college education. I owned a home. I had all these things going for me. I was 10 years older than these kids.”

She tries to get across the importance of developing decision-making skills, to know that saying no is an option. Or “Let's think about this,” she said.


The droid-infants are called RealCare babies, and they're made by a company in Eau Claire, Wis., called Realityworks, which makes a variety of teaching simulators. Among the products in the RealCare lineup are ones that educate new parents and caregivers about shaken-baby syndrome, CPR, babies with special needs, and how alcohol and drugs affect a newborn's development.

The previous generation of RealCare babies had batteries that couldn't be recharged. And to check a student's performance, the computer pack had to be removed from the baby's back. The older ones were invented in a garage about 15 years ago, and Runyan was using them in her class back then. They were loaned out to her students by nonprofits who visited the class, like the March of Dimes. But after funding faded out, she rustled up grant money to buy a set of new ones. She learned how to operate them, and the software, from Ruth Anne Mills, a fellow home-ec teacher at Los Alisos Intermediate School in Mission Viejo.

The current model retails for about $900 apiece, although most schools buy whole sets and get a discount. The device can be programmed to “act” like a newborn, or a baby several months old. The system can tell a lot about how attentive a “parent” is: The baby's computer brain knows if it's left out in the cold, or in a hot car, or isn't sufficiently clothed. If you whack the baby (as some teenage boys are wont to do), or fail to cradle its head properly, it records that as a demerit.

“Today one of the girls came back and said, ‘Somebody was hitting my baby! Can you see if it registered that?'” Runyan said.

The babies can be programmed to act randomly, so they're somewhere in between really fussy or well-behaved. The other teachers know in advance the babies are coming to their classes, but it's still jarring when one of them starts wailing in the middle of a lesson. How in the world do you get a baby to stop crying? You run through the checklist: It's probably hungry, or it has a soiled diaper (electronically, at least). It could be both at once, or one thing, then another.

Some students get so flustered they run to Runyan for help. “It does rattle you, because you can't make it stop,” she said.

Another ingenious aspect to the simulator is the reactions it generates. As the “parents” fanned out on campus, they drew long, bemused looks from classmates as they walked through the quad or ate lunch at an outdoor table.

“Not only with this product do you have the ability to experience what it's like to care for another human being, now you get the societal impact on how others perceive it,” Realityworks President and CEO Timm Boettcher said.

Several minutes into period 3, an English class held in the library this day, Giovanni Alvarez, a quiet 17-year-old with red sneakers and braces, gently rocked his baby girl, named Desiree. A classmate, watching closely, said: “It's embarrassing, dude,” adding that “I wouldn't do it. I'd rather get an F.”

When the baby began squawking, Giovanni sought help from his friend Kimberly De La Cruz, who's also in Runyan's class. They chose correctly that the baby needed changing. He and Kimberly went to work, right on a table in the library, delaying the start of teacher Dorothie Bair's class.

“Give the child some privacy, would you please?” Bair told the onlookers.

The baby stopped crying. Success!


The robot babies are not real babies, and it's not realistic to think any teacher would tolerate the disruption of a student bringing a real infant to class.

“I think this is a good assignment, because it gives them a taste of what it's like to have a baby, but it's not nearly what it's like to have a baby,” says Sandra Corr, the dance instructor who had agreed to hold Andrea's boy for a bit while she and her classmates, wearing black stretchy pants, limbered up to Justin Timberlake's “Body Count.”

She says some students might complain that the simulator kept them up for a night. “Try that for four years in a row,” said the mother of two, now 13 and 11, “when you have one baby that doesn't sleep through the night till they're 2, and then you have another baby, and then that baby doesn't sleep through the night. I didn't sleep for four years.”

Runyan knows the robot babies provide only a narrow window into the all-consuming experience of parenting a young child. And although Boettcher at Realityworks cites multiple studies that show the simulators have changed the way young people think about sexual behavior, Runyan can't quantify the effect they have.

If she can reach one student a year, maybe convince a girl to delay having sex until she's ready to accept all the possible consequences, she will have succeeded. She wants the girls to understand that “some of these guys could care less about you. They just want to get you pregnant, and then they're on their way. And you're left with a child.”

Andrea, who turns 17 Friday, is “total college material,” Runyan said. She has a GPA of 3.0, doesn't miss school, and is applying to colleges. She wants to study psychology, and the truth is, she doesn't actually like babies all that much. “They cry a lot, and they're fragile,” she said. She was mostly interested in understanding the psychology of it all. “We learn a little psychology in that class,” she said.

Andrea said her 19-year-old sister took Runyan's class last year, and is pregnant now. So Andrea's mother was understanding about the computer baby, even when it was waking up at all hours.

“She was like, ‘Maybe you'll learn from it. … I hope you learn from it.'”

Contact the writer: 714-796-2221 or

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