Parent life / School parenting projects · 2002 and 2011
Flour Babies Cry Four Times a Day. Parents Pick When.
The school flour-sack baby is meant to teach teenagers responsibility. One mother in 2002 read the instructions and found out whose responsibility it was.
In 2002 the novelist Susan Straight's seventh-grade daughter brought home a Dear Parents letter headed FLOUR BAG BABY. Materials: one five-pound bag of flour, wrapped in plastic so it doesn't leak, secured with masking tape only, specifically not packing tape, duct tape or electrical tape.
The tape clause is the most specific sentence in American education. No school writes "not electrical tape" without a reason, and I would pay to hear it.
Then the duties, which turned out, Straight wrote in Salon, to be mostly hers. Parents were to buy the flour, help wrap it, dig out the old baby clothes, buy diapers and a bottle, and initial a daily log certifying they had shown the student how to give the baby two sponge baths, three feedings and three diaper changes. And then the crying.
The baby would cry four times a day, the letter explained. "Parents, this is when you get to have some fun." It was the parent's privilege to randomly announce that the baby was crying and needed at least twenty minutes of rocking. "Do your student a favor and pick both convenient and inconvenient times."
That is the only school instruction I have ever been given that I was born to follow.
Straight was not amused. The project, she wrote, had no actual science in it, and the parents were doing all the work, just as they would if their own children had children. Her daughter's view was shorter: "This is the dumbest assignment ever."
At Harker, in California, the 2011 version had at least thought about logistics. When the eighth grade got flour-sack babies for a week, the school set up daycare centers so that students with after-school activities could leave their sacks supervised. Students earned points in science and physical education for taking care of them, and lost points for any neglect. They accessorized with sunglasses, hats and blankets.
Daycare for flour. Supervised. With sunglasses. It is better after-school care than my own children got the year it was me, a laptop, and a bag of pretzels I did not share.
The middle one has a flour-baby project next spring. I have read the instructions twice and initialed nothing yet. I have, however, already scheduled the crying. Four times a day. Twenty minutes each. Mostly during his video games, which are, I am told, the least convenient times there are.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Flour Sack Babies Provide Insight on Parenting, Harker News news.harker.org
- Flour Baby Projects, Mount Carmel Academy mcacubs.com
- Susan Straight, Flour power, Salon salon.com