My roommates love to watch a show that comes on TLC about a family with 18 children. When it comes on, I sometimes find myself watching, despite my best intentions not to.

Two things I’ve noticed about the show strike me as strange. First, when the initial credits roll and the show is introduced, the mother of the family gives a voice-over in which she states that the family is very ‘value-oriented’ and, as a consequence, the parents place limits on their children’s TV time, reducing it to very small intervals.

I find this grating because the practice of limiting one’s TV time does not follow from the (moral?) stance of being a ‘value-oriented’ family. Of course, the term ‘value-oriented’ is in itself loaded, but leaving that aside, how can this not strike even the most non-committed viewer as nothing but an advertising ploy, a kind of clever demographic selection?

Furthermore, although the parents may limit the time that their children watch TV, is it not ironic that they allow their actual life to be filmed for a reality television program (a genre of television widely considered by the general public to be exploitative and morally questionable)? In other words, the link between their children’s life and television is more intimate, more intrusive, and more disturbing despite, and perhaps even because of, their ‘value-oriented’ approach to parenting.