The real kids of TV are precocious, talented, spoiled, and heartbreaking. Their parents often appear on our screens as screeching caricatures. But these parent/child duos and our reactions to them paradoxically expose the tidy boxes we use to contain “legitimate” childhood. They expose the limited way we conceptualize our kids: as sentimentalized, asexual, incompetent creatures with assumed class and racial privilege. At the same time, reality TV’s kids also reveal the flawed nature of such assumptions, as they lift their feathered arms and emerge, bedazzled, from those neat boxes.
