It’s time for a PopWatch PopQuiz:
1) Mother attaches a rope to 11-year-old child’s foot, dangles child over a pit of hungry mountain lions, and returns an hour later to discover that the child has severe scratches on its face. Who should be held responsible for the child’s injuries?
2) Mother places 11-year-old child on the back of Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense, gives horse a slap on the rump, watches him take off at 30 MPH; child falls to the ground, bruising arm and face. Who should be held responsible for the child’s injuries?
3) Mother sends 11-year-old child to New Mexico for six weeks as part of CBS reality series Kid Nation, in which 40 youngsters create their own society without any adult supervision (save for production and camera crews, naturally); child accidentally burns face in the kitchen with spattered grease. Who should be held responsible for the child’s injuries?
Okay, so you see where I’m going with this? According to a story in the New York Times this weekend, the mother of a Kid Nationcast member sent a letter to her local sheriff’s office asking for an"investigation into issues of child abuse, neglect and endangerment"surrounding the show’s production. But maybe this woman should’veconsidered reporting herself to the authorities, seeing thatshe abandoned her preteen child to the loving arms of networktelevision. In the middle of the school year. I won’t argue with folkswho insist the entire concept of Kid Nation is creepy and ill-advised, but it takes a village of 40 parents to raise a child-exploiting reality series. And for what?
Thepossibility of winning one of a handful of the show’s $20,000 "GoldStars"? The pride of reminding neighbors and relatives to set theirDVRs for the very special episode where little Giana mistakenly drinksbleach from a soda bottle? (Such a horror actually occurred on set,says the Times.) Or maybe it’s the chance at your childachieving "breakout star" status, the prospect of becoming the nextDakota Fanning, or Macaulay Culkin, or maybe Lindsay Lohan, with allthe fame and money and emotional catastrophes that come with it?
My husband insists we’ve got to take a stand and avoid Kid Nationat all costs, that it’s just too horrible an idea to be tolerated. Andwhen I think about how I’d feel if my adorable nephew (who’ll be eightlater this year, and thus eligible for the show’s second season) wastorn from his parents for six weeks to entertain the masses and boostCBS’s bottom line, I know he’s right. Then again, I’ve always hated theidea of hating a show or a movie or an art exhibit that I haven’t seenwith my own eyes. So if I watch just one episode of Kid Nation, does that make me a sellout?
Which brings me to the final Pop Quiz question:
4) Will you watch the series premiere of Kid Nation come September 19? And if I watch it, so you don’t have to, am I going to hell?
Comments (1-30) of 71 Add your comment
i’m with you slezak. this show is CREEPY. and on top of it, it looks bad! who wants to hear kids shrieking and laughing and yelling all the time? cripes.
but for reals? a girl drinks bleach?
I would have done a social anthropology study with this as a reality show. This looks like a bad interpretation of Lord of the Flies and for the record it had to be a non-toxic liquid or a bunch of non-toxic chemicals that are drinkable. If you swallow hydrogen peroxide (in a small dose of course) it won’t harm you. However real bleach kills!
Hey, if your kid were Lindsay Lohan, wouldn’t you want to send them to MExico???
I will watch it, and despite all the off camera speculation, I think its a great concept. I was in my pre-teens less than 20 years ago, so maybe its easier to remember what it felt like to be treated like an adult. The sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with autonomy. I think as Americans sometimes we are overprotective of children, even if they arent our own. My parents left me home alone with my younger siblings before I reached puberty and I think it made me a stronger more independent person. I think all the critics need to get off their high horse and lets see the show before scrutinizing parents. Besides… who hasnt mistakenly swallowed bleach at least once in their life
It’s a bad and exploitive concept. Any parent that sends their eight year old to this mess should be sentenced to watch a 1000 hours of child actor horror stories on the E channel.
who the hell thought this was a good idea in the first place?
I mean….the show looks pretty stupid, but isn’t it a bit ridiculous to get this worked up about a television show.
I am going to take a pass on this show. There is no way that I would send my daughter – who is also eligible to participate in this show and I cannot help the bottom line by watching it.
I personally am not going to let anyone make me feel bad that I am actually intrigued by the idea of this show, at least from a sociological perspective. Maybe it will be exploitive and in poor taste, if it is, I’ll stop watching it. But maybe it will actually showcase the resilience and intelligence that children can have and help us to get over this obsessive need to keep our children in some sort of protective bubble. People shouldn’t make judgements until they can actually see the show, not what some article says that may or may not be exploiting the hype to sell a few papers.
I am thinking that the people who think that this is a good idea don’t have kids. A parent wouldn’t leave their kids at home by themselves so you can go see a movie for 3 or 4 hours so for six weeks is okay. I just hope the bleach incident is not true. You could do this but you need adults to keep the kids safe from harm and not make them do backbreaking work all day.
I burned myself with hot grease when I was 13. I was cooking french fries for myself and my brother. Should my parents have been investigated? No, accidents happen while cooking. I think the show has an interesting concept. The kids aren’t voted off and they could leave if they wanted to. If nothing else, it’s a life experience these kids can talk about for the rest of their lives. Who among us has a story that cool to tell. Do you really think they would let something drastic happen to those kids? (By the way, my husband’s cousins drank bleach too. They turned out fine.)
Of course this is a bad idea. We don’t allow kids to vote, drink alcohol, drive, smoke cigarettes, join the military, drop out of school, or get married, because we understand that kids don’t have the good judgment adults are supposed to have. So yes, the show is exploitative. It’s also a dumb idea for a TV show in my opinion. I won’t be watching it.
However, I do feel compelled to point out that it takes a village of 80 parents, not 40, to spawn the 40 kids on the show. The fathers bear responsibility too.
I know this is nitpicky, but can we bring fathers into this, too? It grates on my nerves to see continuous references to mothers letting their kids do such and such, without regard for the other half of the parenting team.
Annie- Agreed, but I think it came up in this case because it was the mother who filed the complaint requesting the investigation.
My biggest issue I think is that they took these kids out of school for 6 weeks to do this. They couldn’t wait till summer? Education is far more important than starring on a reality tv show.
perhaps the producers of kid nation forgot that one of the kids (piggy) in William Goldman’s classic novel, Lord of the Flies, dies…..
A little creepy, perhaps. But to me, it’s even more disturbing that they missed 6 weeks of school.
No, I won’t watch this…I have to vote w/ my remote control, and I will not be a party to this mess…and you know you shouldn’t be a party to it either, Slezak…why don’t you just allow kids to fight in your backyard and enjoy that too? its just wrong on so many levels…television needs to stop stooping to these levels…
I am a parent and still think the concept of this show is interesting, however I don’t understand why 6 weeks that is too long maybe 2 weeks during the normal school break. However I do hope that Slezak will watch it for us.
It’s one thing for a child to burn themselves cooking at home accidentally; it’s another for them to burn themselves cooking on a reality show. This show irritates me and it hasn’t even aired. And if any of the parents involved say the kids wanted to appear on the show, kids that age aren’t mature enough to make truely informed choices (then again, neither do their parents it seems).
Wait why did the kids have to miss six weeks of school? Haven’t the producers ever heard of a three month period known as summer vacation? Where kids don’t have to go to school? Oh yeah, they definitely have the kids best interests at heart (rolls eyes).
I don’t think I’ll watch this show but not for the arguments stated. I just really am not interested. There are arguments that are valid for a social experiment but it would hold more water if it were on Discovery instead on what, ABC?. For them it is ratings and money they want. As for the mom who wants an investigation, pleeeeaase! .She decided to let her child go into this environment.If she was so concerned she shouldn’t have put her child in that situation or investigated it BEFORE her child went.As for grease burns and bleach drinking that goes with being a kid. Sometimes you do things unintentionally that could have been serious.It all depends on the degree to which both happened. I firmly and deeply believe in child safety but this country has gone OVERBOARD! Millions of children get injured every day as well as adults I might add. They survive. They’re fine. We all have.For hundreds and hundreds of years. Let’s get our perspective back people!!
Look. As a children’s librarian I deal with Kid Nation Monday through Friday. Why? Beacause where I work the community center (located in a housing project) has oddball hours and most of the mothers had thier kids at 16, could not go to college and are forced to work two jobs. I call it Kid Nation because the parents have no time to teach their youngesters how to behave so they run wild here. The idea is nothing new and there must be a child psychologist on board otherwise the show would not air.
These kid learned more in 6 weeks at Kid Nation then they would have learned in in school. My granddaugher come home from there a much smarter child, plus she made all her school work up and passed first in the top of her class. So you can not say these kids lost school time, they made all their classes.Some people just like to set back and stir a stink just for the heck of it.Most of these kids are smarter then a lot of adults.
I’m so NOT watching this. You shouldn’t either.
I’m definitely going to watch Kid Nation.
What bothers me most about the criticism surrounding the show is that the critics are just two syllables away from declaring the show kiddie porn and slave labor.
But when I think of all the insane reality shows where grown women act like shrewish schizos in search of some barely attractive man, where so called business savvy professionals show us that the only thing worth knowing is the art of kissing the arse of a billionaire with a bad toupee, and literally thousands of “adults” making fools of themselves trying to pass off their “talent” as singing, dancing or inventing something useless, something tells me Kid Nation might just be a refreshing change of pace.
Kids have accidents. Kids CREATE accidents. And as mean, petty, and immature as many can be, they can also cut to the chase, be insightful, and a lot more on the ball than their adult counterparts.
The show may be good OR bad, but that remains to be seen. And I will be watching.
I’m with Vickie. I’m not watching the show because it looks awful, despite the fact that it features young children.
At first glance the show seems akin to similar social experince shows done on PBS like “Fronteir House”. “Kids Nation” conducts a similar experiment to see how children function without adults. I have no problem with the premise of the show but who it was explored. If these kids had been in a scripted show, they would have had a tutor on site, mandatory breaks, a specified number of hours they were allowed to work and a professional on set to watch out for their best interests. However producers got around this because it is a reality TV show. The show could have been done to some extent with these precautions. Crews could have filmed around breaks (where the kids just played or relaxed) and schools. The kid-run government could have scheluded important events for certain times so that the cameras could have caught all the action. It would not have been a pure “social experiment” but what reality show is. At least the kids would have been safe and not overworked.
There is no way in the world I will watch KidNation. I think the idea is despicable – can reality TV sink any lower?
Kids are hurt every day at their own homes, sure. However they are in an enviroment where their safety comes first. What parent would put bleach in an unmarked soda bottle? These children are of an age when they would know to stay away from bleach. But if it looks like a soda, they are probably going to have a sip. I wouldn’t trust adults who already taught isolating forty kids without school for six weeks was a good idea to have a child’s best interests at heart. If “Kids Nation” was done by PBS or the Discovery channel I may not be as skeptical since these channels are more intersted in education not ratings. ABC has been losing some of its former thunder and wants it back. Unfortunately they decided to take advantage of grade school kids. As for the mother who wrote into the CPS, I wonder if she can be prosecuted for putting her child in a situation where they could be subjected to harm. (Is it even legal to withdraw your child from school that long for something that frivolous?)