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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/glittersoap3 on 2026-07-24 16:29:16+00:00.

This happened a few years ago - I was in 11th grade. The final assignment for my parenting class was to take home the “realcare baby” (a robotic infant simulator) for a few days. Like a real baby, it cries with no regard for your sleep, other classes or mental health. You have to figure out what it needs through trial and error, and keep it up until its satisfied.

You also get a tamper proof ID wristband - the baby won’t accept care without scanning it, so you can’t just hand it off to your parents or whoever. The baby records a bunch of data and your teacher downloads a report of how badly you parented it at the end.

Our teacher let us choose whether to pick it up before or after school, but she recommended before. It gave you lots of time to spot and deal with any issues before you’re stuck with it at home. Not having to be a mom in math class was worth the risk for me, so I picked it up on a Friday afternoon.

Nobody could drive me home that day, so I had to haul the car seat onto a packed public bus. The doll was the size and weight of an actual infant and its face was fairly believable at first glance, so I got some looks. Probably an even split between “huh, that girl in a school uniform has a baby” and, “huh, that 16 year old chose to take her weirdly realistic baby doll to school.”

About halfway to the station, the baby started whimpering. Great. I held my ID bracelet against its chest.

No chime.

I tried again.

No chime.

The crying is picking up. I guess the confirmation chime isn’t working? I put the bottle up to its lips. No drinking sound. I rocked the car seat. It didn’t care.

Now I’m rapidly and aggressively hitting its chest with my bracelet while the crying becomes hysterical. I flip it over and do the same on the neck and butt sensors. Nothing. People around me are obviously confused. Old people from the care home near my school start offering parenting advice that would be great if it were a real baby that wasn’t mechanically failing. “You can hit it all you want, she won’t stop crying until you feed her!”

I finally get off the bus. The baby is FREAKING OUT. The volume and intensity of this crying is now way beyond a baby that’s kinda hungry and more so a baby on that’s been lit on fire. You have two minutes to tap your ID once it starts crying - any longer is considered “neglect,” and it loses its mind.

I’m now on the floor of the bus station. I’m ripping off its pants to change its diaper, pressing the bottle into its face with my other hand, rocking the carrier with my knee. It doesn’t care. FUCK.

EVERYONE in the building can hear the pure agony of this thing. Some people ask if everything’s okay, but majority are side eyeing me and trying to avoid getting involved in whatever the hell is going on here.

I reach to grab my phone from my backpack. I realize my backpack (and thus my phone, wallet and keys) is gone. I was so distracted that I forgot to put it back on before getting off the bus. So now I was stuck in the bus station with an inconsolable robot baby, none of my belongings and no way to contact anyone about it.

I run into a nice girl I know from school with her boyfriend. She lets me email my teacher on her phone, while she looks around in case I just dropped the bag somewhere. Her boyfriends job was to awkwardly rock the baby with his head turned away because the crying was so fucking loud.

The teacher responded saying there was no way for her to remotely shut off the baby, and I should hurry to bring it back before she had to leave. This wasn’t happening because I needed to deal with the backpack situation asap.

I forgot to tell her boyfriend that it really matters how you handle the baby. He tried to make me feel better with some dumb joke that involved shaking it. I feel my stomach drop. Its neck audibly snaps back and forth twice, and it lets out a scream that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. The crying afterwards sounds like the baby is on the brink of death.

Awesome, I’ve unlocked shaken baby syndrome. Me and my baby are sobbing together on my way to the help desk. I figured out the run number of the bus. The employee was too exhausted to give a shit about whatever nonsense was going on with me or my child.

I had to wait about an hour for this bus to come back. The baby took short crying breaks, but it got to the point that I could still hear it in my mind when it stopped. I asked a woman waiting nearby if she’d call my dad and hold the phone up on speaker for me. She said no and kind of backed away from me. I then realized that a teenage girl with mascara all over her face, carrying a very distressed baby doll and asking to use your phone probably looked like a weird scam. I didn’t ask anyone else.

Eventually the bus came back and the driver had my bag. I was so relieved that I sprinted to get it, leaving the baby (in the car seat, covered with a blanket) by a station entrance. As I’m walking back, I can see concerned people stopping around it with “…did somebody just abandon their baby here??” looks in their eyes. I had to lift the blanket and explain my situation once again.

Took my phone out, it was dead. Of course. I really just wanted to go home. I couldn’t check if my teacher was still at school, and I didn’t think it was a kind idea to just leave it outside her classroom door for someone cleaning at night to discover.

I made my way down to the subway. Some people coming up the stairs on the other side start smiling at me and my baby. I see them do a double take once they get a closer look at it.

I’m waiting for the subway, and a woman who seemed to be dealing with some substance issues walks up to me and asks, “Your school lets you bring your baby?” I’m really not in the mood, but I still explain, and couldn’t help but vent about the bullshit afternoon I’ve had. She laughs unsettlingly for a bit. She begins a detailed, mostly incoherent lecture about never letting a man talk you into unprotected sex, no matter what he says. She lists every single possible thing he might say. Smiled and nodded until I rushed to get on a different subway car than her.

I hid in the corner, covered the baby with the blanket and tried to muffle the speaker with my hands. I prayed nobody would see me and think I’m trying to suffocate a real infant.

I finally got home. I fought tears to explain what was going on to my dad.

The baby was taking a break so he wasn’t quite understanding the severity of the situation. “It seems fine right now, maybe it cried itself out.” “Maybe we can just muffle it under some pillows in the basement.”

The completely devastated screaming of the “punish this incompetent single teen mom” machine began.

“Okay we need to get rid of this thing.”

His first suggestion was putting it in the shed. Then we realized someone would probably hear it and call the police about the child in our shed.

It had an internal battery pack, so we couldn’t just take out the batteries. We found instructions online to trigger an emergency shutdown (not sure why my teacher didn’t send me these right away ??) Regardless, the lights and chimes would act like it worked, but it would start crying again a few minutes later.

The screams of neglect were becoming more and more heartbreaking. I felt this deep sense of maternal shame despite it being a robot and not my fault. I start telling it, “I’M SORRY!!!! I’m trying to help you!!! It just won't let me!!! You know that, right?!!” My mom was the same way when she got home.

My teacher and I emailed back and forth for a bit. Eventually, she said she said we could bring it back to school, and a custodian would lock it in the classroom over the weekend. After 12 hours of neglect, it would automatically shut off.

On the way there, my dad made a joke about me getting the premium “colic baby” experience that I wasn’t in the headspace to appreciate. We then handed my baby to the very sweet custodian so she could lock it in a classroom to die.

TLDR: Found out my parenting class robot baby was inconsolable while already on the bus ride home. Lost bag + dead phone left me stuck in public with it for hours. Robot baby ultimately had to be locked in a classroom until it died.