Category Archives: Children

Parents pushing clever offspring into the Channel 4 limelight are uncomfortably close to US TV moms

It must be an inspiration to ambitious parents that the fame of Honey Boo Boo Child, the seven-year-old reality TV star from rural Georgia, has spread to these islands, with her off-screen appearances, as well as her TV show, now regularly documented in places that have not, historically, chronicled the caffeine-fuelled exploits of overweight child beauty contestants.

Even people who have never experienced Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, broadcast here on TLC channel, or its parent show, Toddlers and Tiaras, may well recognise their principal celebrity, who is more often pictured in a state of grubby dishevelment than in her pageant finery; they may even have heard some of her bon mots. “A dollar makes me holler” is one. Her mother’s “If a person farts 10–15 times a day then they’re healthy, so I guess my girls are healthy” is another line to feature in collections of the family’s celebrated table talk.

Possibly it is because the formerly hard-up Boo Boo family are said to make squillions per episode, and will therefore enjoy the last laugh on all its critics, that photographs of a podgy seven-year-old in smeared make-up are already a regular feature in the sort of publications that regularly worry about child welfare in Britain’s Got Talent, and about the sinister impact on girl toddlers of pink toys.

In any case, since the programme seems likely to be accepted here, as in the US, as a historic landmark in reality TV depravity, it is, of course, possible to watch in a spirit of strictly scholarly inquiry, to discover what Jodie Foster meant, when she declared, explaining her wish for privacy: “I’m not Honey Boo Boo Child.” It is also instructive to see how thoroughly it is permissible to exploit a seven-year-old before the child protection agencies become involved.

The best thing to be said about the Honey Boo Boo programme makers is that at least they don’t seem to claim any noble motive for monetising their freak collection. “It’s been called everything from a pop culture phenomenon to an indication of the decay of western civilisation,” is how the crowing TLC channel has introduced the show over here. “But one thing’s for certain, there isn’t a family out there like the self-proclaimed ‘crazy’ Thompsons from Georgia, USA.”

There isn’t? True, you don’t hear many coinages such as Mama Thompson’s “beautimous” on Channel 4′s latest Child Genius series, given that spelling is one of the many tests in which the winner must excel. On the other hand, the families who have agreed, for whatever unfathomable reason, to subject their children to the genius equivalent of the redneck games, are all about being different, like the “crazy Thompsons”.

There can’t, for example, even in the outer, unholiest circle of tiger mother weirdness, be another family to rival Hillary’s, dominated by her determination that her son, Josh, aged eight, should become the youngest-ever chess grandmaster. In order to fulfil her ambition, she calculates, perhaps having read Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, the boy must complete 10,000 hours of practice – 50 hours a week for five years – some of it, less prodigiously than the average viewer might expect, under the supervision of a chess tutor.

Hillary’s participation in the Channel 4/Mensa competition from which they are about to crash out, is, she says, “the chance to celebrate Josh”. But like Honey Boo Boo, Josh is not always in the mood to please expectant voyeurs: he vomits on the way to the event, flounders, gets distressed, wants to go home. Honey Boo Boo’s mother, of course, keeps a supply of sugar and Go-Go juice (a cocktail of Red Bull and another caffeine drink) handy for these crises. In Josh’s case, Hillary tells him: “I love you for trying and I love you for being here …” Hold that thought, Hillary, when you find that the 10,000 hour rule has just been convincingly challenged and it might take wee Josh 26 years instead.

No less than the unflinching anthropologists responsible for Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the makers of Child Genius are also committed to exposing the truth about this minute subset of Britain’s unbelievably intelligent community, to suppress episodes of unusual child behaviour that might lead to ridicule or to future regrets. It’s not unknown. “I bitterly regret that the headmaster of the school where I was seven pushed me forward for this series,” one participant in Michael Apted’s acclaimed, Seven-Up series has said, “because every seven years, a little poison pill is injected.”

Another pulled out, for a while, following tabloid vilification. “I was absolutely taken aback, genuinely shocked at the level of malice and ill-will.” But, mercifully for Apted’s subjects, they were exposed before social media intensified the experience, in ways that should only deepen suspicion about Channel 4′s use of children and the ethics of a wider culture that tolerates such pimping of minors, whether the contract was sealed in Georgia or in north London.

Inevitably, given its extensive experience in human commodification, (Boys and Girls Alone, Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners etc), Channel 4 could have foreseen that the spectacle of one heartbreakingly unstreetwise child sniffing her books and of others showing off or acting up in the various ways their parents have, incredibly, sanctioned for public viewing, would inspire some mature members of the audience to compete with insulting comments. The children were diagnosed, among other things, as “autistic”, “Aspergers”, “dicks”, “arrogant lil fucks” (sic), and “faggots” worthy of a “punch in the face”: a little flavour of how helpful this programme will be in removing the taint of geekishness and singularity that already makes it hard for gifted and studious children to reveal themselves at school.

Since it’s unimaginable that the parents weren’t warned to expect vilification, they, too, must have accepted as a fair price for their own ambitions, or narcissism, the kind of hostilities that would never be countenanced by a Channel 4 producer for his or her own relations. Or not unless they, like the Thompsons or Kardashians, were richly compensated for their trouble and probable disappointments.

Even before the advent of online malice, those “where are they now?” pieces about child prodigies unfailingly turned up individuals with soaring, Mensa-worthy IQs, whose melancholy life trajectories could have been designed to confirm a) that it’s never like a JD Salinger story and therefore b) for young geniuses, the circus is not your friend.

Responding to Sir Michael Wilshaw’s concerns about bright pupils, following the abandonment of the gifted and talented programme, Mensa says such children “should be provided with the appropriate resources to learn and achieve their potential”. Advice that might have been worth exploring had not this organisation just taken a bunch of clever children and parents and persuaded them do something so stupid that it makes Honey Boo Boo look like Mozart.

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