I searched but didn’t find another thread on this show. I didn’t know if I would like it, but decided to give it a chance and to my suprise, I find the show utterly fascinating.
The Premise: Five teenage couples who want to fast-track to adulthood and given a chance to experience it in most of it’s facets. The couples are given babies to take care of for 3 days (all highly supervised), toddlers for 3 days, pre-teens and teenagers for 3 days each, and to top it all off, they are given elderly parents to care for. One of the teens must go to work each day to earn money for food. It’s as much a crash course in real life as I think you can get.
I watched the first episode and have Tivo’d the second. Just haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. I really like the idea. Hell I think it’s something every teenager/20 year old should go through. I admit as a parent myself I’d be very very hesitant to let them watch my child, although once I saw that there was a nanny present all the time that fear eased a little. I do think that giving them children that are a bit older (I think the youngest is 6 months) is a bit of a set-up. By 12 months my son has a pretty set schedule. So giving him to someone that has no idea about his daily routine is guarunteed to start a meltdown.
Still, fascinating show. I especially like that they don’t really win anything. No prizes, no contracts, no new house or anything. Just…learning.
It’s interesting to see who freaks out and who rises to the challenge. Funny how so many didn’t realize for the “baby” portion that babies pick up on your attitude. As in, if you’re happy and playing with 'em, they’ll be happy and giggling, but if you mope around and act exhausted and irritated, they pick up on the stress and get unhappy.
It also appears, from what’s been aired so far, that the experience is a real relationship test for some of these couples. A few of the teens already seem to be questioning: is this person I’m dating always going to be this selfish? And do I really want to put up with that forever?
I haven’t seen it either, but I’m assuming it doesn’t end after four hours and the receipt of cash.
And, 'round these parts anyway, babysitting is no longer done by teenagers. They work at the mall or Starbucks. Precious snowflakes are entrusted only to middle aged mamas, like yours truly. Seriously. Average hourly rate for babysitters in Chicago, as published in the Sun-Times several years ago, was $15. I’m not sure what it is now.
I’m really bummed I forgot to set the DVR. Anyone know if it’s on OnDemand or if I can download it somewhere legal?
WhyNot - My 16-year old niece babysits a lot, and makes $10-15/hr. She’s been babysitting pretty much as much as she wants in her upper-middle-class subdivision since she was 13. But she’s a very responsible kid and all her new referrals come from the parents she’s been sitting for. Her career hopes when she graduates college are to be a carseat engineer. She has no kids, no car, but a $700 Swedish carseat. She’s a baby nerd.
Well, one difference is that it’s basically “total immersion”. The teenage couples are taking care of the kids (and eventually old folks) 24 hours a day. So, when the babies wake up hungry at midnight, someone’s gotta get up and take care of business. Every day, one member of each couple has to go to work, for which they get money for groceries and such; no work, no groceries. In my opinion, one of the best bits is that the parent who goes to work gets to discover that, when you come home from work, work isn’t really finished. There’s still a household to keep up and kids to look after.
Plus, like I said upthread, these couples are learning a lot about their partners. Some are great, pitch in, look out for the other person. Some are lazy and selfish. I’m betting there’ll be breakups, right when the show ends if not before.
This isn’t your run of the mill reality show. There are no winners or losers, nobody gets booted out, there are no fabulous prizes. These are kids who think they have all the knowledge and life experience they need to be good parents right now, and they are finding out very quickly how hard it is. I’m glad that there was someone out there who would be a part of this experiment and let the kids try on their babies. The teens are highly supervised and the parents themselves can intervene at any time they feel they need to. My hope is that this show will make someone watching stop and think before having children, no matter what age they are, but especially if they are very young.
Bolding mine. Just to add that there is a nanny standing by every teen couple ready to dive in at any minute, so the babies are really in no danger.
I love the show, and think this sort of thing should be mandatory for the dewy eyed youths that think babies are cute wee things that stop crying the minute they see a smile and only gurgle happily and who’s poo don’t stink.
I am really enjoying the show, and agree that the girl (Kelly?) that dramatized her way out of the pregnant suit should be flogged, and would add that if her boyfriend doesn’t head for the border immediately after this show, he needs to be hit upside the head repeatedly until he gets enough good sense to run like hell. That little gal is just scary as all get out, and I don’t think a few days with a baby is enough time for her crazy ass demon side to burst out like it would in real life.
It is also a little unfair to the couples participating. They are handed kids that they have never met before in their life. Kids have personalities and it takes some time to learn someone’s individual personality quirks. If they were your own natural children you would have learned that child’s personality as they grew up. On the show they get three days with a set of kids and as soon as they are starting to get an idea about that kids personality, they switch kids. With the older children, they have been raised by someone else up to that point. The couples on the show have no idea how the kids were raised before, while in real life they would have been raising those kids for several years now. I’d be willing to bet that many parents would have a difficult time on this show.
That’s true enough, Maxx, but on the other hand, they also know that these kids are only theirs for three days each, so no matter how bad it is, they can just count the days until it’s over.
I agree, but OTOH, the kids seem to be fairly “normal”. There doesn’t seem to be an autistic kid or a baby with cerebral palsy or a developmental delay in the lot. Any of which - or worse - you can end up with as a parent, providing a challenge roughly equivalent to handling someone else’s kid for a few days.
I hope, though, that the teens don’t follow your line of thinking. I hope that they don’t think that babysitting a child for 36 hours under the watchful eye of a nanny in an already established (beautiful! All these houses are beautiful!) house is as hard as it ever gets. I could see that backfiring and leading to a “well, we can *totally *do this!” mindset. I hope they make it rough enough for them to discourage that.
I did notice that, when the parents handed the babies over to the couples, they referred to just about every one of the wee ones as “Such-and-Such’s youngest daughter” and the like. I can’t imagine parents handing over their first-born, but by around the fourth one, you’re probably like, “Someone else is gonna watch my kid for three days? Hell yeah!”
