Raising Bakersfield

All > Entertainment > Movies and TV
Parents need to prevent real-life ‘Kid Nation’
Topics: kid nation, tv, Valerie Schultz, The Bakersfield Californian
Posted by RaisingBakersfield Mon Apr 28, 2008 18:35:02 PDT
Viewed 58 times
0 responses 0 comments

“40 kids, one town, no adults.”

— Advertising trailer for the CBS reality program “Kid Nation”

Are you nuts? Are you high? Those are the first two questions I would like to ask the parents who allowed their children, ages 8 to 15, to participate in the making of “Kid Nation.” The same parents are now complaining to authorities that their children were injured during the filming of the hotly anticipated reality show, which premieres Sept. 19.

Third question: What did you expect?

The “Kid Nation” concept must have been dreamed up when some enterprising staff member of the production company, Good Time TV, came across a copy of “Lord of the Flies.” The premise of the show is this: 40 kids are deposited in a ghost town in New Mexico, where they are supposed to build a working society without the help of adults.

Divided by the producers into four teams of 10, the children must complete certain tasks within three-day cycles. The team that takes first place receives the most buffalo nickels, the town currency. This team is referred to as the “upper class,” and doesn’t have to do any work. The second-place team, called “merchants,” runs the stores in town. The third-place team, called “cooks,” must prepare all meals and wash dishes. The last-place team, called “laborers,” earns the least amount of money, and is in charge of cleaning the entire town. There are more rules, concerning the structure of government and individual cash rewards. Far from kids creating an idyllic society, this setup sounds like it was dictated by an adult mind, resembling what the rest of us refer to as “real life.”

In sorting this out, it helps to keep in mind that television is, above all, an advertising medium. Whatever programming increases the sales of the sponsors’ products is the programming that we will be offered. Judging by network fare, we Americans apparently have an endless appetite for watching real people get themselves into dangerous, stupid, embarrassing, or unethical situations. We salivate over it. We cannot be sated. We send wives to live with each other’s incompatible families. We send nannies into unmanageable homes. We send young women to compete for the hand of an impossibly eligible bachelor.

We send strangers into close quarters and record their every move. Then we splice together the most humiliating footage, because all we really want to watch is people scheming, attacking, failing, crying and otherwise behaving badly.

Author’s disclosure: I am not exactly a fan of this exploitative, voyeuristic and sadistic programming that is presented as entertainment.

With the debut of “Kid Nation,” we just can’t wait to see how horribly a bunch of kids thrown together in the desert will treat each other. The first 13-episode taping reportedly went well enough that CBS is already casting the second season. Controversy is brewing, however, over whether Good Time TV needed to obtain work permits for the children, and whether CBS violated child labor or welfare laws. The producers insist that the kids were not employees, but rather were living in a “summer camp” environment, and that the $5,000 stipend each child received was not the same as wages earned. The answers will possibly be decided by a New Mexico court.

But all of this is almost beside my point. I am still trying to imagine what kind of misguided parent would allow his or her child to inhabit a ghost town for 40 days with no parental contact allowed. (The parents heard from the producers every couple of days, but were not allowed to speak to their children.) What kind of parent signs a 22-page contract that not only binds his or her child to do whatever the producers say, 24/7, but also agrees not to hold CBS liable for any poor medical care, substandard housing, emotional trauma, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, illness, injury, or death that might happen to his or her child during the filming of “Kid Nation”? Not liable for death? (Did anyone read “Lord of the Flies?”) What kind of parent would abdicate all parental responsibility and expose a child to such unacceptable risk for all the money in the world, let alone $5,000 and a fleeting bit of fame?

It would have to be a parent who is already living in a real-life version of “Kid Nation.” It seems to me that some children already rule over a domestic facsimile of “Lord of the Flies”: Some kids are in charge of the family.

I have heard parents say that they are not attending a family event or a social engagement or even church because “the kids don’t want to go.” These are the parents who go where the kids want to go, eat what the kids want to eat, do what the kids want to do.

Excuse me? I am not a particularly domineering or unreasonable parent, but I do believe that part of being a parent is making your kids go to things to which they say they don’t want to go, and part of being a kid is being made to go to things to which you don’t want to go, but that you later (perhaps) appreciate.

It’s a parent’s job to make sure the kids are not inhabiting “Kid Nation,” to provide structure and guidance and rules of behavior, to establish boundaries and consequences.

And it is a job: parenting is the hardest work an adult will ever do, for which one is neither paid nor thanked nor appreciated, nor even, sometimes, liked very much. That’s why adults, and not kids, are supposed to do it.

We parents need to move out of “Kid Nation,” and focus on parenting within the confines of our own personal reality shows. We need to parent. And we might just need to turn off the TV.

Source: The Bakersfield Californian, Friday, Sep 7 2007

Send to a Friend

Report a Violation