‘Baby Borrowers’ reality: TV at the expense of kids

If you don’t think much about the real-life babies and toddlers in NBC’s “Baby Borrowers,” launched nationally on June 25, you might get caught up by it. The television reality show is promoted with a catchy phrase: “It’s not TV, it’s birth control.”

The story line is to set up five teenage couples, move them quickly to adulthood by having them set up a home, get jobs and become parents. What you may not think about is the true-life exploitation of the babies and toddlers who “play” these roles.

In truth, the babies and toddlers in “Baby Borrowers” are separated from their real parents and caregivers for three days while the unfamiliar teenagers take over as their supposed parents.

As adults, whether we are parents or not, we do not know a great deal about the concept of attachment and how it applies to the relationship that develops between babies and toddlers and their parents. There is a serious body of respected research, going back over more than six decades, about the importance of attachment between very young children and their parents. Babies and toddlers are harmed when they go through prolonged separations and when they are placed with people they do not know; exactly what has been done to the baby “starlets” of “Baby Borrowers.”

Three days may not seem like a very long time to an adult. But babies and toddlers do not have the experience or language to understand any kind of explanation about such a separation. They will cry, cling and keep seeking their parents, becoming more upset as the separation continues. Sometimes they refuse to eat or sleep and may regress to an earlier developmental stage.

A trust is built between caring parents and their babies as they mutually begin to understand, then accommodate to one another’s patterns, as the baby learns the foundational habits of eating sleeping and interacting with the known loved ones who surround him or her. Prolonged separations heighten young children’s separation anxiety and damage their trust that their parents will be available to protect and care for them. The young child can become angry and rejecting of their parents after being reunited with them, damaging the fabric of the child-parent relationship.

The decades of research in infant and child development and early brain development now provide us with a body of knowledge about the importance of a child’s early development. It is within their first three years that young children form attachments to those closest to them: parents, siblings and primary caregivers such as their child care providers. It is at this time that children develop security, a sense of self and learn what to expect from the world around them.

It is certainly true that far too many babies and toddlers live in less than ideal circumstances. Every baby does not have the attachment, security and trust we wish for them. That does not justify NBC’s disruption in the lives of their infant or toddler “stars” on “Baby Barrowers.” NBC, as a safeguard, hired a nanny to be on the set. But the nanny is as much a stranger to the baby as the teenage surrogate parents. The real parents are watching on closed-circuit screens, but this is of little comfort to the babies who have no idea how long they are to be abandoned to strangers.

NBC should be held accountable to inform itself about the research related to separations of babies and toddlers from their parents for extended periods of time. Legitimate social experiments are not conducted on national television or on reality shows. “Baby Borrowers” harms young children by placing them in a situation with potential harmful consequences. Reality TV shows are not social experiments. This is a misguided idea of entertainment, one that puts our most vulnerable children at risk when they need our love and protection.

Jane Weil lives in Steuben. She is board member of the Maine Association for Infant Mental Health.