For the past three years, viewers have watched the Gosselin children grow up on “Jon &Kate Plus 8”on TLC. Cameras rolled as they went on vacation, as they ripped opened Christmas presents and even as they got ready for bed.
But as the children return to television in a new series “Kate Plus Eight,”the use of kids like the Gosselins in reality TV shows is coming under greater scrutiny from lawmakers and mental health experts.
Psychiatrists and child advocates say the shows can invade a child’s privacy and confuse a child’s sense of identity. Reflecting that concern, a state lawmaker plans to introduce a bill to strengthen child labor laws in Pennsylvania, where “Kate Plus Eight” is filmed.
“Kids in these kinds of shows are not having a childhood, and you don’t have to be a scientist to know what’s going to happen to some of them as they get older,” says Dr. Michael Brody, a Silver Spring, Md., psychiatrist and chairman of the Television and Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “It can be a real disaster for them.”
“Kate Plus Eight,” the new production featuring Kate Gosselin as a single mom raising eight children following her divorce from her husband, Jon, is hardly the only one featuring real-life kids in leading roles.
“Toddlers and Tiaras,” which tracks families with children in beauty pageants, started its new season on TLC, while “Raising Sextuplets,” featuring a couple with a half-dozen 2-year-olds, returns for its sophomore year June 24 on WeTV. Meanwhile, “Wife Swap,” which featured the “Balloon Boy” Heene family in its 100th episode, continues on ABC.
“This problem is much bigger than two shows about the Gosselins,” said Brody, who used the term “child abuse” to describe two of the most notorious and now-canceled examples of the genre, CBS’s “Kid Nation” — which put adolescents in a “Lord of the Flies”-type scenario — and NBC’s “The Baby Borrowers,” which left infants in the care of untrained teens.
Beyond issues of privacy and boundaries, reality TV is seen as being potentially dangerous to young child performers because of the very way it manipulates their own realities.
“Just doing retakes, where they stage a scene and then reshoot it again because something went wrong, really screws up a kid’s sense of reality,” Brody said.
In some cases, the consequences can shape the rest of their lives, as the obituary of child sitcom star Gary Coleman, who died on May 28 at 42, served to remind readers this weekend. Coleman said he tried to take his life twice with an overdose of sleeping pills.
TLC, the cable channel most heavily involved in showing reality TV programs featuring children, declined to be interviewed. But in an interview last year, TLC president Eileen O’Neill stressed the “opportunities” that being in the show offered the Gosselins — chances to travel and experience new adventures.
Annabelle McDonald, executive producer of WeTV’s “Raising Sextuplets,” says the most important factor for her is that Bryan and Jenny Masche, parents of the six children in the show, are in control.
“I am always checking in with them asking if everything is going OK,” McDonald said. “They have to be comfortable with everything — comfortable with us being there, comfortable with the people on the set.”
McDonald said she and the crew try to be “supersensitive to the needs of the kids,” shooting only one five-day week out of a month.
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