Egg Sitting: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

American Kids, as part of their health ed class, often have to take care of an egg for a while and treat it like a child. If the egg is broken at the end, or they don't have somebody always looking after it, they will fail. Curiously, this is never run by other teachers at the school, who are less than sympathetic when it interrupts their classes. Usually, the kids are paired for the assignment, but sometimes each individual kid has their own egg.

 

 

Often the egg breaks and they replace it with another one, only to be found out because the teacher had secretly placed a pencil mark on the egg.

 

 

This is something that [[Real Life]] high schools actually do to discourage students from having unprotected sex, the moral being: "Look at what a pain it is to take care of a kid at your age."

 

 

Note that this is a very specific trope to the US (and perhaps Canada) and when it is encountered by others in American-made media, a common response is to think it an example of [[Aluminium Christmas Trees]].

 

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* ''[[Revolutionary Girl Utena]]'' has Nanami taking care of an egg for an episode on her own initiative, but she thinks she laid it and gets a bit upset whenever anyone mentions omelettes or similar foods.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

** And then when she got fed up and passed it on to him, he ended up {{spoiler|accidentally blowing it up when bad guy Omega Red attacked the ''Daily Bugle''.}}

 

== Fanfiction ==

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

** He was also going to '''eat''' his egg, before he learned it had a demon parasite in it.

** ''[[Degrassi the Next Generation]]'', "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For": When Danny discovers that his sister is pregnant, he blackmails her boyfriend into helping him take care of the doll ("you need to learn this anyway"). It ends, of course, with the doll getting smashed in public.

* ''[[Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide]]'', "Bathrooms and Project Partners": Loomer steals the doll from Ned and Cookie, and threatens to send it back piece by piece if they don't do what he wants. Ned gleefully points out that they can just wait for Loomer to send all the pieces back, then put the doll together again. But their teacher moves the end of the project forward, before the doll's head is returned ....

** It should be noted that Ned takes a "Life Science" Class meaning he and Cookie have to raise a doll the whole semester

* Although this is usually played with high school age characters, (are) adult examples have popped up, usually among characters who doubt their abilities as parents (sometimes with good reason): ''[[Frasier]]'' used the trope in one episode, when Niles adopts a sack of flour to see if he is ready to become a dad. The humor comes in that the sack is singed, taped, glued, and otherwise maimed from a series of events that take place offscreen and are highly unlikely for babies to encounter (as Niles put it, "A real baby would have cried before bursting into flames."). Ultimately, the sack was chewed up by the dog and Niles treats the situation as if he had actually lost the child. He also had a dream where somebody kidnapped it and started sending him muffins in the mail.

** Also used with adults on ''[[Las Vegas]]'', where egg-sitting is a homework assignment for a couple's parenting class. The father-to-be's egg gets broken in his jacket pocket, while the expectant mother dresses hers up more like a [[Mr. Muffykins|pet chihuahua]] than a child. She also foists eggs off on other casino staff who aren't yet parents, so they can "share the life lesson".

* ''[[Flash Forward]]'': The main character, Tucker, has to take care of an electronic baby and babysit a live child at the same time. He manages to take care of the living kid, but the electronic baby is broken in an accident, which he tries to repair by using parts from movie monster kits that he collects.

* ''[[Hannah Montana]]'': Oliver bonds with his partner while caring for a sack of flour and they start dating, only for him to discover they have nothing in common when the assignment is over.

* An episode of ''[[A Different World]]'' had this once, where one of the characters was obsessing over the egg as if it actually WAS her child.

* In ''[[The Suite Life of Zack and Cody]]'', Maddie and London do this with a baby doll.

* ''[[Castle]]'': Alexis and her friend Paige do this with an egg ('Feggin'), asking Castle to egg-sit while she and the friend go to a party. Surprisingly, both Castle and Beckett manage to keep the egg safe. However, {{spoiler|after Paige gets drunk at a party and Castle calls her parents, she "accidentally" destroys the egg.}}

* On ''[[The Middle]]'', Axel ends up dismantling the doll to get it to stop.

* ''[[Veronica Mars]]'' has to "raise" a baby-like doll with her boyfriend Duncan for a sex-ed class. It's not clear if they fail or succeed, but Veronica definitely isn't shown to be a reliable parent. Also, the doll serves as [[Foreshadowing]] for {{spoiler|the reveal that Duncan's ex-girlfriend is pregnant.}}

* ''[[How to Be Indie]]'': The class gets an egg sitting assignment in "How to Get Gotten". Indie tries to dodge the assignement by volunteering to escort a seventh grader who is being trialed in the eighth grade for a week instead.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* ''[[A Skewed Paradise]]'' has this as on ongoing plotline.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* ''[[Danny Phantom]]'' has Danny (secretly a half ghost) and Valerie, a fellow student, (secretly [[The Hunter]], trying to capture Danny) take care of a microchipped sack of flour that can simulate crying and defecation. Tucker had the idea of "babysitting" other student's projects for money, but his mother used all the flour for cooking, forcing him to pay everyone back with interest.

** Also an interesting take happens with one couple:

'''Nelson:''' Beats algebra. }}

* ''[[Beavis and Butthead]]'' get a bag of sugar; by the end of the episode, it's in the teacher's gas tank.

* A ''[[Kim Possible]]'' episode plays on this (and a really bad [[Meaningful Name]] joke/pun). Ron is entrusted with a sack of flour, which he's repeatedly forced to replace after a series of slapsticky mishaps. While he lavishes attention on "Sacky I" through "Sacky MCMXXXIIII", he ignores and deplores his new adopted baby sister Hana, whose name happens to mean "flower" in Japanese.

** Made even funnier as Ron and Terry/Batman (above) are [[Will Friedle|voiced by the same person...]]

** The progress of the other students are also followed. Harold and Rhonda are paired together, for example, and she paints their egg to look like it has a baby's face and hair. She leaves to go shopping and Harold, [[Greek Mythology|who is apparently channeling Cronos at the time]], [[Nightmare Fuel|gets very hungry and eats it]]. They ultimately turn in the egg shell, taped together.

* ''[[Drawn Together]]'' subverted this by giving Toot an actual baby (from Nicaragua) for the experiment. {{spoiler|She gets pregnant. ''[[Crosses the Line Twice|And I don't mean Toot]]''.}}

* ''[[Hercules The Animated Series]]'' has the students taking care of eggs as part of their project. Despite his clumsiness and tendency to trip over his own feet and cause chaos and destruction everywhere, Hercules kept his egg safe. Cassandra just went ahead and cooked and eat her egg in front of everyone else.

* ''[[Carl Squared]]'' does it with sophisticated robot babies, including a microchip that records how well the students do at 'parenting'. Carl accidentally decapitates his.

* ''[[The Penguins of Madagascar]]'' had an episode where the gang found an egg and tried to care for it until it hatched. Only Private had any real sense of responsibility, putting the little thing in danger. Eventually, the baby was returned to its rightful mother.

** The duckling they hatched showed he had somehow [[All Your Powers Combined|absorbed the traits of the penguins]] while they were taking care of it.

* ''[[Pepper Ann]]'''s class uses actual dolls as a way of teaching the students responsibility. After spending most of the episode failing at being responsible, she leaves a crying "Irma" on Nikki's doorstep. When she gets home, she monologues about how irresponsible she is as she turns off the lights and TV and prepares dinner for her sister. When her mother arrives home and comments on how responsible she is, Pepper Ann retrieves Irma (who stops crying).

* ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'': In "Perry Lays an Egg", the boys find an egg (that they accidentally knocked out of a tree) that they believe to be Perry's. When Perry disappears, they decide to care for it... to the horror of Candace, whose maternal instincts have been awakened by a nature documentary. She tries to teach them the right way to care for an egg, which apparently involves dressing up in a platypus costume.

* Done more than once by [[Looney Tunes|Daffy Duck]].

* Cody on ''[[Transformers Rescue Bots]]'' is given a robot baby to care for,which ends up having to be saved by the Bots.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

[[Category:School Tropes]]

[[Category:Plots]]