Anyway, I find myself watching it tonight, I found some of the producers' choices interesting:
- While most of the couples chose to have the male go out to work, the show did not require this. Couples made the choice for themselves, and I was glad to see that the show incorporated such a open gender roles in the show. I was also glad to see that the show seemed to show very involved fathers. In fact, I would say that for the most part the guys were more emotionally invested than the girls.
- In the one episode I watched one of the teens mom's from each couple came by for 3 hours to help out. Nearly every mom ran in and picked up the borrowed baby and then gave the "see I told you, you did not really want a baby." Was this really necessary? Clearly the way that the show is edited, most of the teens are not enjoying the experience and most have already vocalized their change of heart. To bring an adult into to deliver this "moral" seems forced to me and co-opts the teens' voices.
- Early in the episode I was really disturbed by the fact that I felt that they were dividing the females as "good" and "bad" mothers. At the end of the episode, there were still females that were labeled as the mothers that were "checked out" "immature" and "selfish." This labeling was slightly negated by the fact that at least one of the "real" mothers talked about her own faults as a mother and how things aren't always perfect. The overall tone of the show still seems to be more critical of the women than the men. Several of the couples might be described as dysfunctional, but there seems to be more critique of the females' attitudes than the males' attitudes. While I realize that bad mothers can be described in lots of different ways, I find it interesting that the bad mothers in this shows are clearly defined as the adolescent mothers. Those who are described as "natural" mothers are those who can emotionally and financially navigate the family (one "bad" mother for example wastes money at the grocery store, while another insists that her husband forgo a paycheck in order to stay home and care for the children while she sits on the couch).
3 comments:
Very interesting stuff. I hadn't heard that something like this existed, but I guess after the "swapping mommies" thing sort of played out a few seasons, something like this was inevitable. There was an ancient practice like this, actually...remind me to tell you sometime over affordably priced sushi *grin*
Okay, now I have to watch this. Maybe we can have a viewing sometime? Sounds like an excellent way to pass an evening... :)
@ cfa I think that there should be a viewing. They've done babies and toddlers. Next week I think they are on to pre-teens. To me it would be more interesting to see them spend longer periods of time with the smaller kids rather than cycle through. However, I would also probably have a real problem if a network actually loaned out real babies for several weeks for the sake of television.
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