Fake Baby Blues

What's the matter with kids today? Well, besides excessive cell phone usage. How times have changed.

It used to be that if you gave a parenting class the fake baby for a week, the students would actually care for the fake baby as intended. Indeed, as little as three years ago, the kids were actually taking responsibility for their fake kids. They would haul them around in baskets and car seats and dress them and feed them with that magnetic/electronic pacifier dealybob, and actually try to stop them from their programmed crying. Except for that one girl who let her dad put the crying fake baby in the top of the closet under some blankets all night, because he had to get up early and needed his sleep. But even she knew that she would suffer a grade penalty for that lapse in caretaking. Yes, back then, they would take their fake babies to the FACS class babysitting service during PE, when they couldn't keep a good eye on their phony offspring. One or two of them might have learned a lesson about how hard it is to care for an infant if you are still a child your own self. But not kids these days.

Nowadays, the kid parents haul their fake babies down the hall in a baby carrier with a heavy textbook balanced on top of the baby. They swing them back and forth like weapons of mass destruction in a crowded hallway. The babies never cry. They must have been broken by several years of abuse. Or else they're a new generation of cheap, chipless fake children made in China. No more computer chip to blow the whistle on abusers and neglecters. Heck, it's a plus to see a rubber baby pass by with his head still attached. Yes. I have seen two inanimate infants pass by with their heads lolling beside their shoulders this week. And their pupil parent has laughed about the deformity. Haven't these kids watched Llamas With Hats? In the llama's voice of reason: "Carl! That kills people!"

The youth of today has no idea how good they've got it. Seems like only yesterday that there were no fake babies to be checked out. Students back then got a bag of flour, by cracky! A bag of flour to heft onto their collective hip, and dress, and burp, and jounce upon their collective knee. Not a lifelike squalling fake baby. Or, if the school was really cheap, they got an egg baby. Yep. An egg baby that they could draw eyes and hair on, and make paper towel baby blankets, and construct cotton-lined box cribs. Their parenting orientation included a viewing of an illegally videotaped ABC After School Special: First, the Egg, starring Justine Bateman and Jimmy McNichol. That's how they rolled, back in the day.

Now everything is a joke, the world owes them a good time, and they can't take responsibility for the simplest things. I've a good mind to throw off my shawl and shake my walker at them!