Note to Our Daughters: TURN OFF REALITY TV

Call me old-fashioned. You wouldn't be the first. But, I am fed up with reality TV. For every "Big People, Little World" that depicts a healthy family, working hard, interacting with each other in a loving way and respecting each other as they muddle through life (with a strong mother AND a strong father), there are literally dozens of bimbo vehicles inundating our daughters with negative images of who they should be and what is am example to aspire toward in life.

Even when networks air supposedly family oriented reality TV, often the roles of women are very skewed. For example, the show "John and Kate, Plus 8" Chronicles the struggles, triumphs and most of all the joys of a Pennsylvania family with twin daughters and sextuplets. Critics of the show say the mom in the show, Kate, is abrasive, too hard on her husband John, and often shrill. Obviously thee critics have never been a stay at home mother to six same age siblings who are still toddlers and two barely school age twin daughters. If Kate raises her voice to her husband, it is for the most part understandable, as often one has to raise her voice just ot be heard above the din, not to mention, how frayed nerves can get at the end of a long day at the zoo, shopping, or just trying to figure out how to occupy all those children all day long at the homestead. Newer episodes of this program reveal a few more dimensions of Kate than did the initial year when the twins were 6 and sexctuplets 2, and they also show more dimensions of John, who initially seemed constantly cast in the role of home improvement in his spare time, and fairly hapless when left alone with the kids. Now that the kids are all a little older the show sometimes shows John out with the three little boys and Kate off for an outing with the five girls - and there is promise of shows of John with the girls and Kate with the boys. Of course the program has the boys on the golf course running wild while John gets to concentrate on his game and Kate doing maternal things like baking or painting pottery with the girls. John and Kate seems like very committed, loving parents and spouses and hopefully if the show continues to peek into their lives it may challenges some of its own stereo types.

Elsewhere in reality land about families are shows about parents of large families. Almost without exception when a family is portrayed on "Kids by the Dozen" or shows about families with 15, 16 or more children, the mother is a stay at home who wears long sskirts, sports an old fashioned hair cut and absolutely submits to her husband's will. In most cases the entire brood is homeschooled and kept away from larger society. In some cases the kids never seem to go off to high school or even college, but fit back into a home-based family business with no one questioning whether this is healthy for their development. Many times you see the children dressed all in the same manner - boys in shorts, polos, jeans, girls in the long skirts and blouses. Only in a few instances have I seen families portrayed where the parents are supportive, but encouraging of their children's independence. Only in a few instances would you look at one of these shows and wisdh those people lived in your neighborhood because they were so fun-loving (to manage a large family you really have to love fun and be able to let go sometimes). On the one hand these shows depicts a very fundamentalish message to your girls and on the other they set up these situations for ridicule.

But those are hardly the harmful reality shows. When you are raising children you work hard to set a good example and you care a great deal about what other influences come into your children's lives. I have two teenage daughters and a preteen son. My oldest is soon off to an out of state college, my younger daughter is very success oriented in school and belives she can do anything any other studnet can do. They have been raised in a single parent household for the most part, but we blend our household with their of their dad and step mom as much as possible. All of our children see strong mothers and a strong father. They see a father working hard, motivating his children, loving them, and mothers who do much the same, constantly challenging ourselves and growing along the way. I am strict. None of my children is allowed to date on a one on one basis until after the age of 16, and then dating is limited to third place after school and family until they are adults. So far it has not caused any setbacks for the kids and we've dealt with issues as they arise. But our every day experience hardly mirrors that of the spoiled brat young adults on "The Hills", "Keeping up with the Kardashians", on the old Paris-Nicole show, and we're not much like Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed, the Hogans, or Kimora Lee Simmons. Most of all we have nothing in common with the three young centerfolds who live in hte Playboy Mansion with octogenarian Hugh Hefner. When I see that show, "The Girls Next Door" and watch one of the three little girlsfriends of the pajama clad king of the mansion go off to her latest nude shoot, or have her private time with a man likely to be older than her grandfather, I think somewhere Gloria Steinem, Barbara (grandma) Bush and Florence Henderson are sitting together shaking their heads in collective agreement that this is not the image we should be conveying over and over again to young women. Set aside completely the hedonistic image our young men are getting with all this available, vapid and eager flesh, what America's Top Model, and The Girls Next Door convey is that your body is your best and in the end your only asset and you are only as successful as you are attractive to powerful men. And, if you can't get powerful men, to any men.

We put on dating shows not where a young woman or a young man interviews people without seeing them and asks them questions before going out on an initial date (the tired platform of the 60s and 70s "Dating Game), but in which dozens of the opposite sex are laid at his or her doorstep and they date, kiss and sleep their way through on the job interviews. Add to that sick platform the ridiculous "Gay, Straight or Taken", in which someone you spend time with is straight, someone is gay and someone is married and you have to figure out who is who, and you've just trivialized the idea of substance in a relationship. It is all about deception, manipulation and winning through blatant use of male of female wiles. And who could forget "Farmer Needs a Wife" in which dozens of women descend upon a farm in a small midwestern town and a hunky farmer puts them through their paces with the town's participation, doing everything but checking their teeth and hooves to determine suitability as a brooding mare.

I've constantly told my children I DO NOT WANT them to watch reality TV. Sure, guys on a fishing boat, animals in the wild, even the focus on the family with generally realistic pursuits is okay. Again I point to "Big People, Little World". Matt and Amy Roloff are little people with few personal lmitations. They work their butts off on their farm. They entertain their four children (three average sized, one little person), coach team and hold out the family home as an entertaining place for other friends as well. Their kids do chores. Their kids play soccer, have terrible accidents, go through trials all children face at one time or another. At one point Amy was asked back to her college alma mater to speak, and she was truly inspirational in her understated way. Similarly Matt, who loves to handle the big equipment and create things with his own two hands, allowed the cameras to follow him through the embarrassment of an unjust trial for alleged drunk driving (it ended up revealing basic bias and an unwilingness to accept that how he handled pedals on his car with his hands may have caused him to veer in the road). Their kids are people you'd want your own kids to know. Sadly, only my son consistently watches this show, and I fear it is mostly because of the tractors and heavy equipment, although he tells me he's learned a great deal about how everyday life can be very challenging to people just because of their size and he admires how they don't let that slow them down.

When I was a child and I raced home from school to catch a little television before mom and dad made us sit down and do homework I watched some pretty mindless stuff. "Gilligan's island" left most of the ingenuity to the professor, most of the cooking and looking pretty to Ginger and Mary Ann and much of the fretting and looking over top of the reading glasses to Mrs. Howell - but it did demonstrate how men and women could work together and respect each other in unpredicted situations. As an adult I looked back and thought Mary Ann really was wholesome and Ginger revealed that the Hollywood image of those starlets as oversexed and willing was less than accurate. She looked great in that evening gown she packed for an afternoon cruise (along with years' supplies of hair gel, henna and curling irons) but she was resourceful and perhaps undersexed by choice. I also watched reruns of "That Girl", where maybe Anne Marie's career was acting, but she was a career girl nonetheless, and she had her principles and even though she'd snagged Donald early on, her life did not depend upon him or upon being married to him. Later it was All in the Family, where Edith stood up to Archie in her own way all of the time and certainly had a mind of her own, Maude, where height was not the only advantage the wife held in that marriage, The Jeffersons, where Louise and Helen alike stood tall for dignity and mutual respect, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which Mary worked her way through life on her own terms. She was kind, smart, not conniving, not overbearing - and she got ahead. In the long standing battle between the well-tended doctor's wife (Phyllis) and the comparatively mousy single career gal for full second banana status, Rhoda beat Phyllis by a mile. And even Phyllis, when confronted with the reality that her husband Lars had cheated with the Happy Homemaker, had her moment when she confronted the homewrecker and demonstrated for all of us out there that jut because SueAnne could better starch his shirts, make his meals and and curl his toes - didn't mean Phyllis wasn't all the women he needed or had a right to desire in life. And let's face it, every girl who is now between the age of 40 and 50 looked up to Marcia Brady. She had it all. She was blond, beautiful, polite, chaste but desireable, active in student government, one heck of a good driver, and while she couldn't catch a football to save her nose, she could balance books on her head. Marcia taught us that while we might not be able to have it all, we could have a great deal if we challenged ourselves once in a while and focused on our strengths. Jan taught us finishing second wasn't so bad either. Cindy taught us to make sure we focused on proper speech patterns early in life.

I guess if I wanted to know what 'real women' were like in the 70s and 80s as I grew through adolescence and into adulthood, I turned on the news or 60 Minutes, or watched the frightening first reality show, "An American Family" on PBS, that showed the disintegration of an untended upper middle class marriage and the dissipation of an untended family. Pat Loud reminded me that even country club wives get thrown curve balls, and just because you have entre everywhere doesn't mean you shouldn't stay home sometimes and get to know your kids. On the news Jessica Savitch, Diane Sawyer, early Barbara Walters (or Baba Wawa as GIlda Radner preferred to call her) and Connie Chung read the news with the same stoicism as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and Harry Reasoner. They probably just smoked fewer cigars. I saw profiles of women like Sister Helen Prejean, who ministered to condemned killers in southern prisons, of Tammy Faye Bakker emerging from the scandal of Jim Bakker's affair and misspent church money. When People magazine did profiles on Billie Jean King they did not focus on speculation about or verification of her sexual orientation, but on her tennis ability, her character coming up in a male dominated sport. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova got equal time, not based on who was prettiest or had the hottest body (one supposes it depends on your tastes) - but who was dominating the sport. Now if you sift through People most of the print is about who's sleeping with who, who babydaddyed who, who's talking trash about who, who's in rehab, who's flirting with bisexuality this week and who's chihuahua was most recently neglected or abused. The faces and hairstyles are almost interchangeable (except Amy Winehouse's). When pretty faces who are also fine actresses like Jenny McCarthy, Tisha Campbell and Holly Robinson-Peete come forward and try to use their voices to address serious issues like how parents are dealing with autism, it gets lost in the mire of who looked better in this Vera Wang dress at this event - you vote. And we have ourselves to blame for that - since someone votes in those stupid poles and someone keeps buying these magazines in their current state.

It's ironic to me that at a time when scripted television actually has many strong female role models (Kyra Sedgwick in the Closer, Holly Hunter and Laura San Giacomo in Saving Grace, Kathryn Erbe and now Alicia Witt, S. Epatha Merkerson of Law and Order, CCH Pounder of The Shield, Candice Bergen of Boston Legal,etc. and even the comedies have strong performers in TIna Fey, Jaime Pressley, Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Melora Hardin, etc.) reality TV is inundating us with bimbos, airheads and bimb-airheads. What have we come to when we're 'entertained' by looking at people's petty, personal conniving, their revolving door visits to drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers (trivializing life-saving programs) and their fascination with themselves. It's bad enough some people can't pass a mirror without looking into it - but we've allowed television to broadcast that narcissistic mirror into our homes. And when it comes to self esteem and issues like personal empowerment, I am sorry, but shows like The Girls Next Door and Keeping up with the Kardashians reinforce that being famous for fame's sake (not because you have any talent or anything of value to share with the world at large beyond easily copied handbags or three page spreads in flesh magazines) is what it's really all about. The daughters of women who were raised to believe you could be a brain surgeon and a mother are being fed the line over and over again, day in and day out - that they can be a centerfold, or a model, or get distribution for their homemade sex tape - and still snag a husband. They aren't being told you can be everything you want to be if you will work hard, but if you work hard on your body everything else will fall into place. They are being told the vessel is what it's all about, the brain - not so much. How many 12-20 year old American women know that in the last six months a woman returning to her native Pakistan to run for president and challenge the existing regime was assassinated (Benazhir Bhutto), in Colombia a former presidential candidate (a woman) was recently released after years in captivity (Ingrid Betancourt), and in America a woman running for president finally had a chance of winning a primary(Hillary Clinton) but we were more focused on what she was wearing and what her husband had to say on the campaign trail? Now how many 12-20 year old American women likely know the answer to what 16 year old starlet recently gave birth to a baby girl (Jamie Lynn Spears), what 48 year old ex-wife of a wrestling star is currently dating a teen aged boy (Linda Hogan) and what celebrity mom wants more air time on her reality show for her children to boost her ratings (Denise Richards)?

Our daughters need to get out from behind the TV (our sons too), and especially need to be turning off so-called reality TV and instead they need to focus on their own real lives. Just because it isn't 'scripted' doesn't mean it isn't faked. And just because someone pays to put it on TV doesn't mean you have to watch it. In fact, if we poked our noses out of other people's puffed up and air brushed lives and began to focus on more important issues, eventually most of this dreck will go away and we'll redefine who each of us is and who we are as a people.