Mia Krogager Mathiasen

The dream of becoming a parent in an early stage of life is particularly prevalent among young vulnerable people in Danish society. This is due to the notion that a child will change their lives for the better, in reality this is often not the case. The local authorities have to intervene more frequently in cases with marginalised young parents than in other cases in society. In consequence, a growing number of Danish municipalities have in recent years acquired technological infant simulators: baby robots designed to give young adults a preview into the future of parenthood. But how do local government workers use robot technology to impact the decision-making process about parenthood among young vulnerable people? Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in the municipality of Svendborg during ‘clarification programs’ with nine young people, the paper shows how the infant simulator paves the way for a new social reality, in which the participants can explore the ‘possible in the actual’ through a pre-enactment of their potential futures as parents. However, the simulator’s agency, consisting of it’s ability to generate new reflection among the caretakers in the nursing process, requires that certain relations between the human and non-human actors in the social network are present (Latour 1992). The effect of the infant simulator is generally seen as a postponement or abandonment of the future as a parent among the young participants. Hence, questions of ethics and technology-use is strongly embedded in the municipal ‘model of solution’ (Jöhncke et al. 2004) with infant simulators.