This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher and Tagyatta.

Used to be teenage kids had to carry around a bag of flour wrapped in a blanket

to learn their responsibilities of parenthood.

But these days, the same lessons taught with high-tech dolls that cry and record every interaction.

They get grumpy, you have to rock them to calm them down. They have to be fed.

Sally Brinkman, an epidemiologist at the Telethon Kids Institute in Australia.

It's supposed to be so tiring and so difficult that it puts them off and they say oh no I don't want to be a teenage

mom and then they think about contraception and all of those sorts of things.

Problem is that theory that the dolls will... contraception and all of those sorts of things.

Problem is that theory that the Dahl's will discourage teenage parenthood

doesn't seem to be true, according to a new study by Brinkman and her colleagues.

The team recruited nearly 3,000 13 to 15 year old girls for the trial from

57 schools in Western Australia. All the girls got the standard Australian curriculum on

contraception and sexual health, but half had to care for the infant

dolls and got extra education sessions with the school nurse.

The team's hypothesis?

We thought either it's going to make a difference or it'll make no difference whatsoever.

We haven't expected that it would do the opposite.

And in fact, the girls who cared for the dolls were nearly one and a half times more likely to get pregnant before

age 20 than teens in the control group.

The findings are in the Lancet.

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