Parenting and Publicity:
Meredith has developed over the last year a taste for certain ‘reality’ shows that probe into private lives - as in poking inside a family household to see how it works. I have some real reservations on all of this, which I’ll go into in a minute.
In each of these cases, the family has one or more kids and a non-’conventional’ setup of some sort, and the non-conventional part is highlighted majorly in some way. The result is not just seeing how the other half lives, but seeing people in non-standard situations and their ability to cope or not cope with it. Of course, the attraction in all of this is to see the extreme, the ten-car pileup, the disaster and go tsch-tsch.
(1) KIDS GO WILD: Epitomized by SUPERNANNY, this is where the parents are willing to go up in front of millions of people on TV and say ‘my household is out of control, I need help with these kids’. In most cases, the reason is that the parents aren’t good managers of the home and the kids - they are often just not able or willing to put a lot of time into making a house a home where everyone belongs. Sometimes it’s beccause they’re so centered on work (or their personal whatevers) that they have no time for the kids. Sometimes it’s because they can’t deal with balancing discipline, structure and family togetherness time.
(2) EXTREMES IN HOUSEHOLDS: Let’s swap the mom in two households that are at extreme ends of a spectrum and see what results! Usually, the formula is something like ‘extreme free spirit’ versus ‘drill sergeant’ and you watch the fur fly in the conflicts, not to mention the possiblity that both households may learn not to be so extreme.
(3) FIX ME UP: Needy household is in dire straits, and the hosts of the program decend on them to fix up their problems. This can be a situation where the family are mad hoarders who have let the house decend into an unliveable pit, or a family that is plagued by all sorts of bad luck that is finally getting a helping hand to get a major redo (to the point of having the house replaced and totally redone).
(4) I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY CAN DO THAT: Household is special because of some basic difference in the family - most notable of this sort is JON AND KATE PLUS 8, where this man and woman have major fertility issues, and end up with a set of twins and then a set of sextuplets. The show centers around the question of how these people can cope with such a crowd.
The answers to it all after the cut.
We have had our minor time in the sun in ‘publicity’ in regard to the twins; I’ve always been seen amongst the parents as the most willing-to-deal-with-publicity, but after the ABC program, I decided that I’d had enough.
One thing I learned early on is that while people like the opportunity to peek in your house, they also like the ability to be endlessly critical of your motives or actions. And while the quickest way to upset a person is to critique their parenting skills, the easiest thing for many is to level such a critique. Ditto with anything regarding your lifestyle versus theirs, your judgement or choices versus theirs. And there’s not a way in the world to ever end that struggle.
I find that most of these reality shows are repetitive and - well, aside of seen-one-seen-’em-all, it’s a matter of feeling icky about it. I have never been a big privacy fiend - to the point of irritating others on the subject - but I also don’t want to *watch* the messes. Or the kid rampages, or the people with sticks-up-their-hineys running their houses like a military bootcamp. To me, it’s a part of the human experience that I’m well aware of, but I don’t really want to watch in close order, any more than video of people wiping their hineys after defecation. If I want stupid-people-tricks, I can find plenty of them close at hand, and I don’t have to turn on the TV to see them.
It doesn’t make me feel superior. It just makes me feel icky, and like I’m peeping in at them, regardless of whether they signed releases to that direction or not. Mere’s starting to get that way as well, I think.
I’m well aware that these people get some kind of remuneration for what they do on TV. We never did. (Susan, Mere and I got a flight down and back to Alabama for the Good Housekeeping article so that the person doing the article could talk to everyone at once, see and photograph the twins in action and so forth. ABC refused to pay for the Alabamans to come up here and killed a day filming us in and around our home - if you saw photos or videos of the twins in the ABC piece, those were ones taken by us and passed on to ABC.) But whether or not they get anything out of the deal, I still feel like I’m intruding on their lives, and I really don’t want to.
There are some exceptions, I suppose. The parents on the sisterfar list talk about their situations where the kids have to deal with the separation issues and whatnot, and other things of that nature. The Bernstein-Schein book about those separated twins was interesting because so many critiques that were fired at us for getting the twins back together said that we should just wait until the twins were adults and THEN tell them about our suspicious or thoughts on the matter, and then let them deal with it. My take after reading the book was that we picked the far better course for the girls than the one forced on the twins in the book, who reunited when they were in their 30s.
But that’s more specially proximate to us, not just rank voyeurism.