Hey, remember that time Time put a picture of a woman breastfeeding a toddler on the cover of their magazine and people around the world got all skeeved out by it? Guess what. It’s going to be a TV show now. Produced by the creator of Dance Moms. Yeah.
Thematically, the series will stick to the Dance Moms formula of exploring eyebrow-raising childrearing practices. “I’m interested in peeling back the curtain to look at choices other people make that will have a huge impact on their children or their lives,” Collins said. “I’m fascinated by the way other people raise their children. I grew up in a very conservative small town and everyone kind of raised their kids with the exact same values so it’s interesting to me to see so many people breaking the mold of tradition.” [TV Guide]
Nononono. No. NO. Absolutely not.
See, this is why we can’t get upset whenever some idiot at a magazine or newspaper or whatever gets a bright idea and decides to put something “controversial” like this on the cover. Because then we see it on the newsstand at the grocery store and we tell our friends, then someone posts it on Reddit, then Buzzfeed runs it, then Twitter explodes with everyone making the same joke about it, then it ends up on CNN like a week later and some exploitative weasel television producer watches and giant dollar signs appear in his eyeballs where his iris and pupil used to be. Now it’s going to be a TV show, meaning not only are these poor kids going to be raised via “extreme parenting” whatever in the upside-down hell that means, but also that they’ll be paraded in front of a national audience while it’s happening — an audience made up mostly of people watching to see the human equivalent of a car accident, but with more than a few people sprinkled in who are watching to get ideas about how to raise their own children, meaning even more kids will be put through this. No. Stop it.
Unfortunately, it looks like it’s too late to put an end to this one. According to the TV Guide article, producers are already “in negotiations with a few networks” (read as: TLC is shooting money at them out of a cannon). BUT, here is my proposal going forward: next time you see some story like this bubbling up, calmly walk over to the magazine rack, grab all of the issues with the blatantly “controversial” image on the cover, and light them all on fire in the middle of the produce section. Will you go to prison? Probably. But everyone has to make sacrifices during a revolution.
