Lower Sixth pupils have been learning about Attachment theory in their Psychology lessons. As an experiment, the pupils were challenged to take care of their own ‘child’ to see if they experienced any separation anxiety as per the infamous Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’ experiment from the 1970s. In this case, their child took the form of a handheld digital pet, known as a Tamagotchi.

The Tamagotchi is such a fun and interesting way to interact with what we are learning about in Psychology. It helped a lot with my understanding of the lessons as it provided me a unique way to apply our knowledge to everyday life, as well as giving us a new perspective on our academic content.
– Dedee (Lower Sixth)

The aim was to keep their Tamagotchi child well looked after until the Summer term Long Exeat. We now hand over to Natasha (Lower Sixth) for her review on life as a new mother!

‘It goes without saying that there is no guide or rule book to parenting. This, for me, was learnt the hard way. Although we were given an instruction manual, I decided to plunge into the deep end via skim reading and pure guess work. I couldn’t be more wrong.

My Tamagotchi started out as a little egg but after 5 minutes my parenting journey began. I named my Tamagotchi Zabel – meaning leading light of the people. This is where I believe my attachment to him began. What I found slightly strange was that each Tamagotchi had a slightly different personality depending on how you were treating them. I discovered that Zabel loved cake which although was a good thing, did lead to many future tantrums and food strikes.

My first 24 hours with Zabel were slightly stressful and not the easiest. This was when he was most needy and I could not put him down for less than 15 minutes without him needing something. Due to lack of daycare, I took Zabel everywhere with me; Strength and Conditioning, Politics lessons – Zabel even made an appearance at my church. I was enjoying my journey of motherhood and just had to go with the flow. I loved taking Zabel everywhere with me and showing him off to my friends and family members – I was a very proud Tamagotchi mother!

Although becoming a Tamagotchi parent was a fun experience some of the downsides included waking up at odd hours of the night to feed my Tamagotchi child, discipline or even entertain him. This part was not so fun, and I have to say I did silence him on some occasions.

Overall, I enjoyed my experience with Zabel and eventually grew very fond of him! I loved this interactive Psychology assessment with Zabel and found that it related clearly to some of the signs of attachment we learnt about in lessons.’

– Natasha, Lower Sixth