When Schools Made Kids Care for ‘Egg Babies’ to Thwart Teen Pregnancies

Whether you’re familiar with the phrase “egg baby” depends largely on whether you attended middle or high school in the 1980s or 1990s. If you did, there’s an excellent chance your health or sexual education teacher required you to “adopt” a chicken egg on the premise it could teach you about the responsibility of caring for a newborn.

As you’ve likely figured out on your own, the difference between a human baby and an egg is rather substantial. So did the “egg baby” trend actually make a difference in the teen pregnancy rates it was trying to curb?

Hatching the Egg Baby

When teen pregnancies spiked in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, and again in the late 1980s and early 1990s, schools came up with creative ways to discourage them. Sex education for preteens and teens became more pervasive, and curricula devoted to imparting the consequences of caring for a child when one is a child themselves was seen as crucial.

The actual inception of the egg lesson is hard to identify. One story published in a Connecticut newspaper in 1979 mentioned a course at East Lyme High School that had been going on for four or five years, with home economics teacher Betty Sweet dispensing eggs because it was “the closest thing I could find as fragile as a baby.”

Another early mention of the egg baby concept came in 1977 when students at North Bend High School in Oregon got their lesson in egg-sitting. The raw eggs were toted around for two weeks straight, and any accidents were reported to the faculty. The shells were in attendance during gym class and at part-time jobs. Should a student be unable to care for their egg, they’d have to hire a babysitter.

It was in the 1980s, however, that the idea really took hold. A 1985 Morning Call story reported that kids at Quakertown High School in Pennsylvania were busy tending to eggs handed to them during home economics class. The students were expected to carry the eggs with them 24 hours a day. If mishandling resulted in a crack in the shell, it was perceived as a symbolic death and a failure.

Some students would get upset when their egg baby expired. While that may sound ridiculous, part of the exercise was for the kids to develop some emotional investment in the perishable good. The soft-boiled (sometimes emptied) eggs were named (Eggbert was a popular choice), given faces (in marker), and appeared in scrapbooks. A crack, or death, resulted in its caretaker having to pen an obituary.

Eggs could “die” in any number of ways, ranging from collisions in high school hallways to not being properly secured during car rides. In at least one case, the egg baby was eaten by a dog.

Cracking Under Pressure

Anecdotally, the experiment had some effect: Kids who were considering starting a family in the near future reconsidered. “A lot of students have come back saying they’ve re-evaluated their plans,” Quakertown teacher Gloria Peck said. “The majority come to the decision that they’re definitely not ready for children.”

It was not necessarily a cracked egg that drove home the pitfalls of parenthood but the constant minding of the eggs. Many students observed that needing to find someone to “watch” their egg emphasized how much attention a real baby would demand.

As schools entered the 1990s, the experiment evolved. At the turn of the decade, students at Dunedin High School in Florida tackled a slightly more sophisticated version of the lesson, with certain variables accompanying their eggs. One egg baby might have food allergies; another practice parent might have “twin” eggs.

Not everyone was a fan of the egg project. “No eggs!” one internet message board for teachers cautioned in 1999. “The custodians will hate you forever!” Instead, some teachers utilized sacks of flour or sugar to mimic the physical and emotional toll of a fragile dependent. Some crafty students, however, wound up siphoning out the sugar to make their “baby” easier to carry.

Shellshocked

Eggs and other grocery items were perceived as the most economical way of imparting parental responsibilities on to kids. But at the end of the 20th century, such experiments lost ground to realistic infant simulators, including a high-tech doll named Baby Think It Over (now RealCare). Rather than relying on the pretend parent’s imagination, the plastic newborns made audible pleas for attention. They could also track when caretakers were ignoring demands like diaper care. While more effective than coddling an egg, they were also hundreds of dollars each. (Today, a RealCare doll is listed at $1200 via the manufacturer.)

It’s difficult to say whether such lessons have any real effect on teen pregnancy rates, though they’re likely to prompt would-be parents to think twice. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the teen birth rate was 15.4 in 2020, or 15.4 births for every 1000 girls aged 15 to 19. That’s down 75 percent from the 1991 high of 61.8, and the rate has dropped yearly since 2009. The government credits the downward trend to teens delaying sex and the increased use of contraceptives. While egg babies and infant simulators are likely not an overwhelming factor, they probably didn’t hurt.

Nor has the baby egg gone completely out of style. While not nearly as common as they once were, some schools still make use of them, including Germantown Elementary in Illinois, which handed out eggs in 2021.

Read More About Education: