To be ashamed that I used to look up to 'Supernanny'

[Celticliving]

I've been a nanny for over 25 years now. I used to look up to Jo Frost, and I would despair at some of the parents on her show.

Now I know how TV works, I'm a little less shocked but this link shows a family that I remember watching. I think I cringed all the way through but this explains so much.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeoTgp2U/

Firstly, the producers used to tell the kids that if they weren't really really badly behaved then they wouldn't get to be on TV..

Any reality tv show involving children, particularly behaving badly, is wrong.

Or having your boobs groped by Gok Wan.

Ah, the old days...

It's just something that's of its time, a common alternative then was smacking, suddenly a naughty step doesn't seem so bad anything that showed there were options other than physical chastisement. Also it was a TV show not a parenting class.

HRFT but American tv is made very differently because of different compliance rules.

Most UK-broadcasted tv is subject to Ofcom, which has clear guidelines on what can & can’t be done. Misleading through unfair editing or manipulation isn’t allowed (look at Queensgate scandal where a trailer made out the queen had stormed out of a meeting, entirely falsely).

Contributors aren’t (usually) paid in the UK, but almost always are in the US. I would be surprised if the family weren’t paid for their appearance on SN USA - but don’t know for sure. Turning the relationship between producer & contributor into a transactional one invariably (IMO) leads to situations where the producers feel entitled to ask for what they want in terms of performance. It’s gross and, along with constructed reality like TOWIE, has helped destroy documentary filmmaking by offering audiences more outlandish content.

Her other points about SN wearing the same clothes - it’s not to mislead, it’s to make filming & editing easier so you can get all the arrival / leaving / filler shots and put them wherever required - but using reactions from one conversation as if they are from another is a big no-no (in the UK).

SN having a drink before filming - insensitive / stupid to do it before going to the house of an alcoholic, and unprofessional before going to work, but boundaries were less clear in the 00s.

Bring back the Barbara Woodhouse methods I say. She got those naughty dogs under control😂

There’s nothing in that tiktok that makes me think anything other than her father was an arsehole who yelled and hit his kids and took extreme objection to a woman calling him out for being an arsehole

I never got into those sort of programmes because I guessed the kids were encouraged to behave badly. Children do misbehave sometimes, we all know that, but most not that badly and not all the time unless they have some sort of health problem.

From clips, and from what others told me, it was obvious they were coerced, bribed or whaever. It was pure drama - who in their right minds in real life wants their family's unpleasant business displayed on TV anyway? None of it added up. Shameful.

I just hope no parents took the supernanny's advice.

Also, regarding kids being told to act - I’m a bit on the fence about this.

Is that what happened?

Or did the producers have a word to suggest the kids be as extra as they want to counter the likely affect of the presence of cameras / strangers? And also because they have a limited time to film everything (probably 4 days for a show like this) and need to ensure they get the extreme behaviour reported by the family when they applied.

The problem of consent always bothered me. Imagine going to school the day after the episode featuring your family had appeared.

That’s a form of child abuse right there. I’m amazed no one has taken a case against the production companies

I had one of those kids that get out of bed 400 times, absolute bloody nightmare. I had watched Supernanny before I was a mother and her advice helped. Bring the child back, no matter how many times, don't engage, don't speak or get angry, no cuddles just firm repeated actions. The alternative would have been either locking a child in their room (as many suggested) or have a child wandering dangerously around all night.

I know some of her stuff has been criticised but she was about empowering parents. The lack of parental confidence these days is obvious, there are threads nearly every day here about how it affects not just kids and their parents, but society as a whole. I work in childcare now and still believe her approach was mostly excellent, with some tweaks.

I watched supernanny growing up and I think it was a breath of fresh air at the time from the discipline my peers and I recieved at the time. There was a lot of shouting and smacking but also unrestricted freedom, I was out playing for 6 plus hours a day up to all sorts, going into random friends houses for tea. As long as I was out the house it didn't matter what I was up to. When people say that her methods are cruel they were considered soft at the time.

She gave the kids rules and expectations and gave the parents a way to discipline that didn't involve hitting their children. She called out lazy/uninvolved parents. She made it very clear that the problem was with the parenting, not with the children which was a very different school of thought than the time.

Her methods certainly weren't perfect and she became a bit OTT with the American shows where the culture was so different. Alongside this parenting has changed so much and we now are much more actively involved and more in tune with our children's emotions.

However that in itself is controversial and I know one school locally where they have very little behaviour management because parents will never agree that their child could possibly misbehave and they have to be 'invited' to detention and one punishment for swearing at a teacher was to go rock-climbing with the headteacher during school time.

Yeah how much did they pay people to subject themselves to that.

Also thought they didn’t dress to cover their own flaws all that well tbh.

I'm not at all surprised about it being staged: in lots of these shows, the outcome is probably decided before they start filming. I remember one episode where a child broke a car window by throwing a brick, and Jo was telling him "that man is sad now".

The window breaking did not happen on the screen; and I very strongly suspect that it was not that young lad who broke the window at all, and the car was driven in, with the producer tapping his or her nose, saying "here's one we prepared earlier".

Ha yes, the idea that being completely naked in a public place while being filmed would make you really happy with yourself. He never got naked though I noticed.

I liked watching SN, I never believed in the naughty step - why would you put yourself through that battle of wills? Not good for anyone IMO. But she always listened to the kids and tried to make life better for them with an equal amount of boundaries and enjoyable activities I thought.

I used to think she was great, till I learned a modicum about neurodivergency, disregulation etc. A lot of these children needed understanding not labelling as naughty. Supernanny is only one woman - the whole production team ought to be ashamed.

They certainly shouldnt have been shamed all over TV. I’ve seen plenty of tv shows where they handle disruptive and angry children with a much more compassionate vibe and with much less shaming of the parents and children.

What I used to think of bad parenting, I now can see are the actions of exhausted parents who have learnt to pick battles, and need to take the easier roads now and then because all of their roads are fucking hard.

I don’t doubt people can peek into my parenting and witness many incidents where it looked like I could have been better, more present, prepared. But the TV show can’t adequately demonstrate what 5-10 years of hard grind raising a child with adhd and autism and the battleground it creates.

There were lots of structural stuff I remember as being valuable to families - but so much of it toxic to the communities of children with biological behavioural differences.

Worse than all that is that Supernanny has since doubled down on being an absolute shit head. Ignorance is no excuse when she has many people trying to help her understand the alternative, science led approach. Attached image taken directly from supernannys own social media account. It was not taken down despite significant backlash.

Absolutely. Ok so she’d just lost her dad, I have sympathy for that but she is delusional about the facts, even stating ‘ok, so I don’t hit my kids…’ and still thinking he was somehow a victim of unfair treatment by a tv show he presumably agreed to appear on. And the personal attacks on Jo Frost - completely irrelevant to anything - were deeply unpleasant.

As critical I’ve been about supernanny in my post I do actually agree with this.

it must be really hard to get some children to act up at all on camera. When uncomfortable some children act out, others shut up.

even if they children were acting up it would still highlight parents difficulties in managing them.

There was an episode of House of Tiny Tearaways (much more problematic show, I thought) where they sent the family home early because the kids wouldn’t misbehave on set.

I haven't watched the link but if it's the US version all these things are more scripted and usually contain some sort of disclaimer about this.

I found the consistency she promotes very useful when I had my own children. I returned them to bed kindly and calmly but was very much in the 'its bed time ' camp (once past babies). It does work.

I can't imagine too many families with impeccably behaved children applied but equally, filming takes place in a limited time frame so I can see that they'd use ways of 'recreating' situations or dramatising them further than reality. This applies to virtually everything. You know even David Attenborough programmes cut footage together to create a story that isn't exactly as it happens.

Years ago I used to buy into these type of shows, naive looking back.

I was once involved with a charity, I won't name the show but it involved someone who was rich " secretly" joining the team, then after getting involved " revealing" themselves to be a rich benefactor.

On the first day one of the volunteers said " I think you are from that show", it was so obvious.

When the grand " reveal" came, we had to film it numerous times until we looked surprised enough.

Most TV is fake bar sports but "reality" TV is probably the fakest of them all.

I think the people who make these shows largely despise their subjects and their audience.

And some of it is filmed in studios / sets rather than in the wild.

She didn't have a speech impediment.

I disagree entirely. There is a lot of duty of care that goes into making tv involving the public. Of course there are some notable exceptions and horrible outcomes, but I don’t think everyone - or even most people - making tv hates their contributors or audience.

It’s a shame the jig was up so early on your show, and arguably the producers made the wrong choice to hide it in the show, but it’s tricky with formats where the plot points require a specific narrative conceit.

It was just of its time. I liked watching it 20 odd years ago and genuinely do think it helped some people in places where violence was the norm. It helped me when ds1 still wouldn't sleep except for on top of me age 2. I did the bedtime putting him back down in the cot 100 times on night 1, 50 on night 2 and night 3 he just accepted this is what bed is now.

I agree it hasn't aged well. The time out and rewards charts style parenting isn't going to work on a lot of children. The refusal to recognise neurodiversity and making money out of struggling children who can't consent feels all sorts of ick now. But I genuinely believe she cared about the children and did it for the right reasons. You can't judge the past by current morality.

I barely watch TV nowadays because it's all scripted and manipulated and also designed to elicit emotions that I simply no longer have.

Most news programs and news outlets generally are the same.

I feel burnt out by media.

An asteroid could be heading for my back yard and I would not take notice of the news report about it. The world just feels like it's full of sclerotic shite apart from animals. Animals are great!