If I can be honest, I love a good reality TV show every once in a while, but one about teen pregnancies? Not so much. Now, I may be called a hypocrite for saying this as I am not old enough to have ever watched MTV when it really was purely music videos, but that sounds like a wonderful channel to me. I do enjoy a bit of reality TV every once in a while, but to the extremes that MTV shows it is just outlandish.
To truly dissect the channel I must confess that I do on occasion watch Jersey Shore, as well as Awkward and Teen Wolf, but shows like 16 and Pregnant are just ridiculous. I understand that on all of their teen pregnancy shows the mother almost never ends up happy or with her Prince Charming and, to be honest, the show scares me into practicing safe sex more than any talk about protected sex from a parent ever has, but it is still exploiting teen pregnancy. The girls on the show often end up pregnant again soon after as an attempt to end up on TV again. It is like they are being rewarded for screwing up. When I am a mother one day in the very far off future, if there are still shows like this on I don’t think I would want my daughter watching it.
Jersey Shore is just a whole different realm of reality TV. I do find it good for a laugh now and then, but boy am I glad that the show has been canceled and everyone on it has, hopefully, started to turn their life around. The show made binge drinking every night of the summer and getting into fights every week seem like a glamorous lifestyle. As a parent, I don’t know if I would want my child watching a show like that. In high school the pressure to drink is high enough as it is, so you don’t want to add on shows like Jersey Shore that make drinking yourself into oblivion seem fun and cool.
On the other hand MTV doe still has a few good shows. Awkward and Teen Wolf are two fabulous TV shows that I avidly watch, but of course they are scripted, or at least slightly more scripted than reality TV. They still are not appropriate for a child in middle school, but for a responsible teenager, they are both interesting and amusing shows that I thoroughly enjoy.