Childhoods in reality television

Contemporary culture circulates competing discourses of childhood, some limiting and oppressive, others veiled by neoliberal promises of individual empowerment, and still others offering child-centered, feminist alternatives. Reality television, which purports to reveal the most honest and intimate aspects of its subjects’ lives, serves as a critical yet under-examined site for these discourses. Its claim to “truth,” combined with recognition that reality television is both performed and purposefully packaged, positions it as a unique arena for understanding how childhood is socially constructed, maintained, and contested. This project examines four child-focused reality television programs—The Parent Test (ABC 2022-2023), Dance Moms (Lifetime 2011-2019), Bring It! (Lifetime 2014-2019), and Gogglesprogs (Channel 4 2015-2017)—to explore how these series engage with discursive constructions of childhood. Informed by childhood studies, girlhood studies, reality TV studies, and feminist television studies, the analysis employs textual, industrial, and socio-cultural approaches to analyze how these programs participate in both reinforcing and subverting dominant cultural narratives. The Parent Test positions parents as responsible for managing children’s present and future success, reflecting neoliberal ideals of self-regulation and expert-guided parenting, while constraining childhood within developmental and disciplinary frameworks representing children as at-risk objects without meaningful agency. Dance Moms and Bring It! highlight intersections of race, youthful femininity, and the physical discipline of dance, revealing postfeminist mandates for girls to be “sexy, but not sexual” while negotiating racialized expectations of innocence and adultification. Gogglesprogs portrays children as active meaning-makers whose engagement with news and documentary media demonstrates political skill, efficacy, and citizenship, even as the show’s broader reception reinscribes notions of innocence and futurity. Together, these analyses illuminate the intersecting discourses that shape contemporary understandings of childhood in reality TV. By examining children as both disciplined objects and agentic subjects, this research contributes to the study of childhood under neoliberalism, revealing the tensions between empowerment, regulation, and expectations of age, gender, race, and agency.