Troperville
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Kids, as part of their health ed class, must 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.
Usually, the kids are totally irresponsible, and will either play catch with the egg, fight over it, lose it among several hundred other eggs, or otherwise risk flunking. Hilarity Ensues. Often, when the students are paired, the main character will have to work together with someone he or she doesn't like — or may have another kind of tension with — to get themselves out of the mess they put themselves in.
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 trope is also semi-common with teenaged superheroes, who must then try to fufill the assignment while keeping up with their crime-fighting.
This is something that real-life high schools actually do to discourage girls from getting pregnant, the moral being: "Look at what a pain it is to take care of a kid at your age".
In the real world, the eggs have mostly been displaced by lifelike dolls, equipped with features to make them even more annoying, like a battery-powered chip which makes the baby scream. Only some Egg Sitting episodes have made the switch. Occasionally a third option is used. A bag of flour or sugar, for instance, which more properly imitates the weight of a baby.
Subtrope of Parents For A Day. Compare Egg Mc Guffin, the more literal version.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Revolutionary Girl Utena has Nanami taking care of an egg for an episode, but she thinks she laid it and gets a bit upset whenever anyone mentions omelettes or similar foods.
- Futaba Kun Change has a similar chapter, but it's a misunderstanding arising from the main character's Jerkass sister having hard-boiled eggs in his bed as a midnight snack and leaving one there.
Comic Books
- Happened during the "Death of a Goblin" storyline in Ultimate Spider Man, with Peter awkwardly paired up with X-Girlfriend Kitty Pryde. Pun intended.
- And then when she got fed up and passed it on to him, he ended up accidentally blowing it up when Omega Red attacked the Daily Bugle.
Film
- In Garage Days, Joe babysits a watermelon ("Melly") to prove to his girlfriend he can have a kid. When Melly gets "killed" (hit by a car, no less) he becomes distraught and almost suicidal. I think it might've been the drugs.
- In License to Wed, the couple being tested by Robin Williams's character are given a pair of extremely disturbing baby dolls. In addition to being equipped to scream and cry (very loudly), they are also capable of various other functions, including... You know what, I'm not going there.
Literature
- Flour Babies is based entirely around this trope, as a boy looks after a bag of flour and discovers the truth about his parents.
- Eve Bunting's Our Sixth Grade Sugar Babies, likewise, is a book whose plot is based solely on this trope.
- In Holly Black's Valiant, Ruth and Val take care of a flour sack together, which prompts Jen to call them lesbians.
- Unfortunately, Val commits infanticide so that she can use the flour to expose a faerie's glamoured apartment. When they fail the project, they try to scrape together a paper about the effects of post-partum depression.
- In Lisi Harrisons The Clique, Claire's class takes care of synthetic babies; the data can later be uploaded to the teacher's computer.
- In The Girl Talk series, they had an Egg-sitting episode, mostly for a "Not So Different" set up between Zek and a quiet pianist. Though it's notable for the fact The Libby tried to cheat by boiling hers, and how a guy accidentally sat on his.
Live Action TV
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "Bad Eggs": Xander cheats by boiling his egg so it won't break. Lucky for him, because the eggs turn out to host alien parasites.
- Degrassi Junior High, "Eggbert": Spike and Shane are partners — appropriately enough, since he got her pregnant in a previous episode. The project helps bring out the worst in the entire cast.
- 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.
- Neds 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 ....
- On That 70s Show, Jackie uses this as a test for Kelso. The egg is broken and replaced, but he manages to explain away the missing pencil mark as having given it a bath.
- 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.
- So did Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip: The simulation doll ends up being decapitated by a "safe" prop guillotine, then put back together (...mostly) by the prop department of the Show Within A Show.
- 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.
- 8 Simple Rules: Everyone uses the flour for baking, leaving the "baby" deflated.
- 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 assignemnt is over.
- Head Of The Class: Standard hijinks ensue, including one student losing his egg at a Star Trek convention.
- Lucy and her boyfriend get this assignment on Seventh Heaven. When something happens to their egg, Ruthie advises them to write that they aren't ready to be parents, which is the whole point of the assignment, anyway.
- 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, Maddy and London do this with a baby doll.
- Parodied, like every other high-school trope, on Strangers With Candy, where a teacher announces that "in order for you to learn what it's like to take care of a ten-pound 'baby,' each of you will be taking care of... a ten-pound baby." Sure enough, each pair of students is assigned a live child. Jerri and her friend Tammi quickly fall into the roles of "abusive husband" and "doormat housewife" repesctively, and the baby is spectacularly neglected in the process.
- Castle: Alexis and her friend do this with an egg ('Fagin'), 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, Alexis' friend purposely drops the egg after she and Alexis get into a fight.
- On 227 the kids had to take care of a live piglet. Whether there was a different animal for Jewish/Muslim kids was unexplored.
Webcomics
- This strip
 of Ctrl Alt Del manages this whole trope in four panels. Ethan is tricked into believing that bees grow in bags of flour, and drops the bag.
Western Animation
- South Park, "Follow that Egg!": In order to spite her former lover, Mr. Slave, Ms. Garrison puts Stan and Kyle together for egg-sitting, expecting them to break their egg — and thus provide evidence against the legalization of gay marriage. When they don't break it, she hires a hit man to kill the egg.
- Danny Phantom has Danny (secretly a half ghost) and a fellow student (secretly The Hunter, trying to capture Danny) take care of a microchipped sack of flour that can simulate crying and defecation. Another classmate 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.
- Similarly, in OGrady, Kevin (the Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller and Humphrey) babysits everybody else's dolls for money. Abby discovers that he's been reprogramming the dolls' memory chips to record that everything is fine. She responds by reprogramming them to scream twenty-four hours a day.
- Batman Beyond: Terry is unable to get anyone to babysit his electronic egg, forcing him to take it along crime-fighting. Not only does hilarity ensue, he ends up getting the highest grade in the class, as only his egg was properly "stimulated." (Notably, this is the episode of the series that won an Emmy, and the commentary on the DVD explains that this was intentional—it's a funny episode in a serious series deliberately as award bait.)
- 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.
- Hey Arnold!: Arnold and Helga get paired together and spend the entire assignment arguing, losing the egg in the process twice. The second time they find it, they put aside their differences to work together — and then the egg hatches into a baby chick.
- Drawn Together subverted this by giving Toot an actual baby (from Nicaragua) for the experiment.
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