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The world of parents who are overwhelmed by their toddlers being, well, toddlers, and who have to call in help to manage their little heathens, is something of a mystery. In America those shows enjoyed a brief flare of popularity that soon died…probably because we just went back to letting our kids do whatever they wanted.
But what happened after Jo or any of her counterparts left? When the cameras stopped rolling? What was it like living under those tight rules for any period of time at all?
Well, you’re in luck – these 17 people lived through it, and they’re here to dish!
17. This is like two separate stories.
Like 3 years ago, I lived in a big 5 bedroom house with 4 other friends in college.
The house was in an episode of Supernanny. We found out because our nice neighbor literally gave us a signed headshot from Jo Frost as a gift out of the blue. He literally told us “ I think y’all would like this more to than me and get a kick out of it.” It made our week and we found the episode online and watched it. I asked about the family to the neighbor as our house was rented out and owned by a property company.
He told me after the show the parents fought all the time, lost all of their money due to 2008 crisis, and lost the house to foreclosure.
The picture stayed on our mantle for three years and I thought about that family everytime.
16. I am cringing just thinking about it.
A coworker was featured on SuperNanny. They had a pretty good experience filming and were so excited for their show to air that they hosted a watch party.
I’m sure you can imagine what’s next-the way the show was edited made the parents look SO bad—like, neglectful bad—and made the kids (who were pretty wild) look even worse. It ended up being a pretty awkward watch party.
15. I do not understand parents like this.
One of my friends in grade school was on nanny 911 as a kid (maybe around 5 years old).
There were a lot of kids in her family and one of the biggest problems the nanny had with their household was safety. She baby-proofed the entire house and lectured them on safety precautions they have to take in their lives to ensure that the children wouldn’t get hurt. She even gave them all helmets to wear whenever they rode bikes or 4 wheelers.
After she left, a lot of the safety precautions went out of the window and later my friend told me that they still had the helmets but they were all sitting in a dusty corner.
14. It’s terrible it had to come to this.
I’d like to contribute, hopefully someone sees this! My brother was on a show called Violent Children: Desperate Parents and honestly they were brilliant. I wasn’t part of this whole experience because I was in University at the time, but my father and my brother both were in this show and the show staff were honestly brilliant. Here in the UK, especially Wales where my family lives, mental health is not really a thing the poor have access to and my family are definitely working class. This show gave my brother and my father access to mental healthcare they would have never have been able to access themselves and made quite a large difference in both their lives. They continued to support my family for almost a year after filming with offers of more mental health help, and both my father and my brother are happier people today because of this.
One thing I will say is the only reason we were featured on this show was out of pure desperation. There was basically no other way that my father could imagine getting help, given he’d spent almost 8 years fighting with the NHS to get my brother psychological help, all to basically no avail. My family were made into entertainment for the masses so that we could access something fairly basic. Something about the whole experience doesn’t sit right with me at all.
Happy to answer any further questions!
13. Wait places like this really exist?
I went to an all boys correctional school 40 miles into the high desert in Washington State. A couple other guys there went on shows like this and they never worked, hence being at the correctional school.
The school did pretty good straightening most of us out, HOWEVER unfortunately there’s always a couple guys who just wont follow rules.
If our school couldn’t help you, you would be sent to “the other place” which was basically a terrible juvenile prison in Mexico that was ran by US Marshal’s.
One day one of these marshals came to give a talk. He spoke about “the other place” and basically scared the shit out of us. At the end of his speech he said “and unfortunately one of you is coming with us today” and we all simultaneously shit our pants.
He says the name of the kid he was taking, we’ll call him Collin. He then tells Collin to empty his pockets, take off his shoes and belt, and places him in handcuffs.
The director of the school said some encouraging words to him and asked if any of the students wanted to say bye or wish him well…dead silence
Then his roommate stands up and says “I packed your stuff. you had no bags so I put all your shit in some trash bags”…”oh and uh, I’ll miss you I guess?”
A piece of Collin died that day..
I never heard from him or about him after that day. Based off the rumors about that place in Mexico, its possible he could still be there, and it’s been 7 years since that day.
12. So just like every other reality television show?
I’m a little bit late to this one, but my younger siblings, mother, and then step-father were on a programme in the UK called Mum’s On Strike in the mid 2000s.
The premise was that the mother would be sick of doing everything around the house, and would be whisked away to a luxury spa for a weekend, leaving the clueless father in charge of trying to take care of the household duties.
A lot of the conversations and scenarios were faked. I supposedly visited them for the weekend, but I did multiple different shoots across a few hours on the last day of filming, then went back home.
They’d cause fights between the siblings by purposely creating situations where one was favoured over the other, so the others would throw a tantrum.
There was a shoot on location in our local town centre, and they encouraged my little brother to run off into all sorts of different shops, causing hilarity as my step-father tried chasing after him with two other children in tow.
Mealtimes were a bit of a farce as well – as it was a weekend, my step-father had to cook a traditional roast dinner. The production company intentionally supplied incorrect ingredients to make sure my step-father looked like an idiot. They filmed my reaction to him trying to add beans to the roast a few different times, so they could pick the best one. In the end, after they’d got all the footage they wanted, they sent one of the production team out to the chippy to get us some actual edible food.
11. And we all missed out on the angry bear man.
Didn’t end up on it, but my family was approached to take part in a German version of the reality show “The World’s Strictest Parents” (Die strengsten Eltern der Welt?). The reason being my father is somewhat well known in my country for being a bit of a wild man; looks like a Viking, very into the outdoors, fishing, hunting etc. They’d found a special of him on 60 minutes and a few clips of him adventuring online and thought that Germans would enjoy watching bad kids being set straight by the “bear man”.
Anyway the interaction was done through a middleman so to speak, who outlined what would be required of us, and what (small) compensation we would receive for going along with it. At the outset it seemed fine, even a little exciting. We had had close ties with a lot of exchange students in the past (we lived in a very small community in the mountains and we all loved traveling), and my father didn’t seem to mind the sound of helping out some struggling kids and possibly showing them a different side of life. Not necessarily that hunting and the outdoors are the only way to go, but more open their minds a little and take them out of their comfort zone etc. We watched a few clips of the show online and decided that we were laid back enough as a family that the drama wouldn’t really wind us up or anything
Well alarm bells started ringing after a bit more correspondence with the middleman. He started insinuating that there would be times where the kids would be told to play up situations, and that we would have to either roll along with the staged drama, or actively join in and amp it up for the cameras. My dad laid it out pretty straight, saying he’d be happy to take these kids under his wing and show them some pretty cool adventures – he had glacier crossing, hiking through rainforests, caving, white water kayaking, hunting (or at least watching him hunt) and tons of other activities across our country all planned out. I’d just become a SCUBA instructor and even offered to take them out diving on geothermal vents. But they really stressed the whole “people watch this show to see bad kids act batshit crazy, so that’s what you’re expected to encourage” vibe. We politely turned them down at this stage.
A few months later the middleman actually emailed us and told us it was probably a good idea that we hadn’t gone along with it. Apparently they never paid him for any of his work organising host families or setting up scenarios. Ah well, dodged a bullet there I guess. All my friends in Germany seemed to think so!
TL;DR German reality show wanted us to encourage struggling teens to throw temper tantrums and make my Dad look like an angry bear man. Turned them down
10. Gotta keep people entertained.
I was on scared straight and my episode never even aired because they only select a very small amount off footage to make it look a lot worse than it actually is most prisoners were pretty nice
9. So it didn’t work, is that what you’re saying?
I knew a girl who was on Scared Straight….After the show she ended up addicted to heroin & going to rehab..Hope she got her life together.
8. Well that took a turn.
There was a program here in spain that was like supernanny but for teenagers. One of them was a guy who lived with his grandma and had a very violent behaviour. During the show you could see how the guy changed and started having a better relationship with his grandma, but I guess it was just an act because when the TV crew left he killed her.
7. I don’t know how much change you can actually affect in a week.
I didn’t go on, but some classmates went on Super Nanny or Nanny 911 (can’t remember which). They lived rather close to my friend, so i went over to his place to watch the filming and such. The nanny stayed in their neighbors house across the street, and the kids behavior didn’t improve for a very long after the nanny left. From what i remember they were trouble all through school, i lost contact with all of them during middle school.
Edit: just remembered, the parents ended up divorcing not too long after the show.
6. I used to love that show.
I don’t know if this counts but I was on an episode of MADE on MTV (if anyone remembers that show)… It was my senior year of high school, so about 7 years ago. People gave me crap about it forever and still do. I was made into a “screamo” singer, the experience is interesting to say the least. The money and flight/trip to NYC though at 17 years old made the whole embarrassment worth it. Plus I work in the broadcast business now so it really opened up a lot of doors and showed me a career I LOVE. Seeing kids now that were in my shoes, so fascinated by entertainment media makes me so genuinely happy.
5. You just never know what’s happening next door.
I lived in India. Once in my school when I was in sixth grade these “foreign kids” pop up with a bunch of cameramen and stuff. Speculation went wild. We thought our terrible principal probably wanted to create a “cool” image for the school and was creating some kind of weird advertisement.
Anyway, years later I saw a YouTube clip by complete chance of world’s strictest parents. It was my school and those exact kids! They had come to an Indian family, whose children went to my school. The episode was a lot of drama. The parents were kind of obnoxious, at least for the episode. However, the last I heard on asking a few friends was that those parents were fine and their children are doing reasonably well. Not sure about the “foreign kids” who came.
What a small world! Seems like ages ago.
4. Say it with me.
Friend of mine worked on Nanny 911 in nyc. Nothing on that show happened unless the producers ok’d it. They would come up with scenarios and plot points to film. You don’t just shoot TV shows like that and hope that something magical happens. They created every “issue.”
Reality TV is not real.
3. What a weirdo.
I went to high school with a kid who was on super nanny when he was like 11. Apparently him and his sister’s behavior weren’t all that bad, and that one day a camera crew just showed up at his house. He also told me they were trying to force an emotional scene where he would hug his mom and say he loves her forever or something and he was like “no that’s gay” and they were like please and he was like no. They settled on “love you mom”
2. So, nightmares?
My friend was on Supernanny, they don’t actually do anything, it’s just acting, he and his brother are still exactly the same as they were before.
1. Based on these other stories, he probably would have ended up fine anyway.
My brother went to school with a kid from the scared straight show, the comb my chest hair kid if you have seen the show. He said that the kid used to get messed with after the show aired but now lives a pretty normal life and stays out of trouble as far as he can tell. So I would say that the show works I guess lol
I mean, I can get on board with some of this stuff, but listen. You should be able to control your kid on your own, yeah?
If you have anything to add, do it in the comments!
