Here's an idea for a TV spot that programme makers have brainstormed on. Let's get two toddlers who have just learned to walk racing each other. They could be dressed up in mini sports gear. The race would last until one of them fell over!
Here's some ideas for a whole series. Let's have a clinical psychologist or a nanny go into the homes of parents at their wits' end with misbehaving children, to trouble-shoot what they've been doing wrong and tell them how to fix it. How about lending babies to teenage couples to test how they'd cope as parents? Or watching parents try out different care techniques popular in the past on their own babies? Better still, a whole set of children could be observed growing up on camera, with an eminent scientist making pronouncements on their development and their families' lifestyles ... that one could run and run.
All of these scenarios are familiar to UK television viewers. Except for the first one - the racing toddlers may never make it to the screen. Julian Grenier, head of Kate Greenaway nursery school in London, says he complained when he was approached about supplying said toddlers.
'The dignity of the child is being called into question, in order to raise a cheap laugh,' he says. Of recent fads on the small screen, he says, 'It's using young children like cannon fodder for media entertainment, not considering them as people whose rights need to be upheld by others, because they cannot uphold them for themselves.
'We should consider what it says about attitudes to childhood, when babies are used for the purposes of social experimentation and entertainment,' he adds. 'While it may not be possible to say that the individual child is being harmed in these programmes, the state of childhood is being harmed.'
Nurseries and schools are used to seeking permission before they dare to put children's pictures on their website or even allow parents to videotape the Christmas play. But when it comes to television, there is no shortage of volunteers seeking their 15 minutes of fame - among the parents, anyway. The effects on participants may last far longer, however. Now children and family organisations are uniting in a campaign to force broadcasters to use 'real' children more responsibly.
Guidance for broadcasters, and for childcare professionals approached by them, is being drafted by a group including the Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association, the Family and Parenting Institute, the National Childbirth Trust, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the NSPCC. They were spurred into action by the furore over the possibly abusive way infants were treated in last autumn's Channel 4 series 'Bringing Up Baby' and the BBC's 'The Baby Borrowers'.
CODE QUESTIONED
There are no mandatory regulations for using children appearing as themselves in programmes - unlike the rules for child actors and models. There is only the Office of Communications' (Ofcom) voluntary Broadcasting Code, with its section on 'Protecting the Under-18s', which was used by Ofcom to clear Channel 4 last December of the hundreds of complaints made about 'Bringing Up Baby'.
But Ofcom had commissioned research to consider the very issues troubling children's advocates. Its report Children in Programmes, also published last December, followed on from a study done in 2001 when it was the Broadcasting Standards Commission, called Consenting Children: the Use of Children in Non-fiction Television Programmes.
The earlier study focused on the issue of whether children are competent to make their own decisions in giving or withholding consent, and whether their parents have the right to over-rule or pre-empt children's decisions.
The most recent study gauged the views of families about a range of programmes and their awareness of what might go on behind the scenes. It found them unhappy that children are always depicted as 'problems' and worried about the child participants being teased or bullied in their school or community after programmes were aired.
'Respondents felt that some extreme cases could have been exaggerated to create sensational television to capture ratings and may not reflect real life,' said the report. Most of all, the parents mistrusted their peers - 'Parents felt that parental consent alone was insufficient for adult non-fiction programmes because it seemed that parents may not be able to separate their own needs from those of their children.' The parents in the study also feared that children would mistake these shows for something that was aimed at a child viewer.
But the families found benefits and insight, too. 'Many children appreciated that children on television were giving a voice to children's opinions, and many parents felt empowered to instigate change at home, particularly regarding their parenting skills and developing better relations with their children,' said the report.
So, with these contentious issues already seriously considered by broadcasting regulators, why are children still being put in front of the cameras - perhaps exploited?
QUALITY CONTROL
The guidance group drafting what some of them call a Strategy for Cross Sectoral Working to Improve the Quality of Parenting Programmes on TV acknowledges that the shows that cause the most controversy get the highest viewing figures. And the chance at celebrity status lures participants, says Maggie Fisher, a health visitor who is professional officer at the union Unite/CPHVA. 'But people don't understand the editing process, and how stuff that's filmed gets cut and only what's sensational is left in. What ends up on TV bears no resemblance to their recollection.' Sadly, she notes, children watching later may feel hurt or distressed by something their parent said in a heated moment.
She has doubts about the off-screen experts that the programme makers claim to have consulted. The executive producer of 'The Baby Borrowers', Richard McKerrow, said about the filming, 'We had a psychologist or psychotherapist there, we had cameras in every room, plus nannies who were ready to step in at any point ... We had far more professional care available than, say, in a nursery, where there might be ten to 15 kids to one teacher.'
But the guidance group wants professionals like themselves to be choosing the experts. One of its aims is to provide advice for those who are approached to make professional comments or supply children or families for programmes, like Julian Grenier was.
'We might get a call from a junior TV producer who will say they need two mums and an antenatal teacher,' says Anne Fox, campaigns manager for the National Childbirth Trust. The NCT, she says, has its own procedures for working with the media, but many organisations do not. The group is drawing on the media-handling policies of Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, which has years of experience of TV cameras coming in. But they are trying to draft something that can be used by anyone working with children and families - which could include early years settings. 'We want to produce a standard and uniform guide across the sector, leading to industry good practice,' says Ms Fox.
What they are not aiming for is to get parenting programmes off the air. 'We don't want these programmes taken off the telly, because we know parents find them useful,' says Ms Fox. 'We just want to make sure that what's on is good, sensible information, based on evidence.'
The Family and Parenting Institute's campaigns manager, Sally Gimson, is also adamant that the group wants parenting to remain a subject for television, reality or otherwise. The FPI commissioned MORI research in 2006 in which 83 per cent of parents who had watched such programmes said they found a technique there helpful to them.
Ms Gimson dislikes programmes 'where no knowledge is coming out of it for viewers', and has no time for programme makers' moral justification that they're being 'educational', and once their show is criticised, say that it's 'only entertainment'.
'We all need to be more media savvy,' she says. As 'media' widens to include new technology, and families watch television and use the internet together, the group's guidelines are a call for everyone to take greater responsibility. 'These are issues for parents to talk about with their children at any age,' says Ms Gimson.
But any popular trend changes the attitudes of the viewing public. Today's children are growing up without any concept of 'just say no' to mass media, as they watch adults willingly exposing their own bad behaviour on reality TV.
Indeed, in these few short years children are seeing celebrities who were child stars with Disney like Hannah Montana and Britney Spears find even greater fame as sexy models or perpetual visitors to rehab clinics. Even while we tell them to beware of strange adults and not to give personal details on social networking websites, children are coming under more and more pressure to share their private lives with a world of strangers.
Further Information
- Children in Programmes: an independent research report for Ofcom by Sherbert Research, 12 December 2007, at www.ofcom.org.uk
- Consenting Children? The use of children in non-fiction television programmes, Broadcasting Standards Commission, June 2001, at www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/bsc/plain/pubs.htm
- Parenting and Television: Avoiding the pitfalls of reality TV, by Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association, at www.amicus-cphva.org
- Family and Parenting Institute, www.familyandparenting.org
- National Childbirth Trust, www.nct.org.uk.
