Why Should You Avoid Reality Shows Based On Children?

Why You Should Avoid Reality Shows Based On Children?

Let’s admit, most kids are cute and they are entertaining. Their entertainment value is almost directly proportional to their cuteness, which is more than a workable currency in the prime time television industry.  The other fact, which the industry is not quite concerned about, is that kids are not fit to give informed consent.

It has almost been a month since I angrily stormed out of the sets of a kids reality show based on the age group of 12 or so. I was hired by the production house (I had not signed the contract yet, I was to sign it the next day) to be the psychological counselor for the kids and their parents facing elimination and other hardships of competition.

This morning when I answered an unknown number from Delhi, I was reminded of that day once again. On the other side of the phone was the same mother of a participant whom I had to placate and pacify after she saw the way her son who had just been eliminated from the reality show was being treated compared to the kids who were still part of the game. The other eliminated kids and their parents had the same beef with the production house.

She told me that the reason she’s calling me is because her son has still not been able to get over the trauma he suffered at the hands of both, the production house and her own. She felt really guilty of having put her son through such an unnecessarily excruciating experience regardless of her good intentions of giving her son, an experience she thought would enrich him and make him worldly. Since then a few other parents of the kids who participated in the show have also spoken to me.

Their fears were common, that now the show will soon be aired, as the promotional teasers have started coming on television, and they and their children will go through the same trauma they underwent during the shooting of the show.

I have chosen to write about this topic for two major reasons. The first being that for quite some time now, we’ve been watching an onslaught of reality shows featuring really young kids and it cannot be stressed enough the kind of serious effects that participation in shows like these can have on a child’s psychology. This is not an over protective parent in me that “thinks” this, it is a concern shared by psychologists worldwide. The second major reason being the personal experience I had on the sets of this reality show. Hence I want to distance myself from them because of the ethical conflict I would have continued to have working there.

A child’s mind is very different from that of an adult in a way that the higher faculties of understanding and judgment, that we take for granted, have yet not fully developed in a child’s brain when he or she is thrust into an extremely competitive environment. A child by himself does not understand failure at a task as failure of self; it’s a social learning. A child’s natural tendency is to try things and then move on to other things if he is not able to do what he first chose. However in settings like that of a reality show where they are taught the meaning of national success and hence failure as a corollary, the child cannot make the distinction between his failure at a task and his failure as a person.

In shows like these the child is caught between the expectations of the parents and the production house and the pressure of having to meet both. And if the child fails he is made aware of the fact even in its denial. The worst part of many bad aspects of the show was, the staff that was handling the kids; young college interns (read cheap labor) who had no training leave alone formal grooming, around how to deal with kids. Shouting at the kids was a commonplace thing, with their parents sitting right across them. The interns and even some senior production people from the team, did not seem to have any skills other than raising their voice and widening their eyes to scare the child shut.

Many parents who allow their kids or sometimes even encourage their kids to participate in such shows believe that it is their child’s wish to participate. They fail to realize that a child’s consent cannot be construed as informed consent.

Would you allow your child to burst firecrackers without supervision? Or play with electrical sockets simply because he wanted to? A child sitting at home watching the show on television does not see the amount of pressure that he will be put through, the long hours of shooting that he will endure and the harsh judgment that they will undergo. I am talking shooting till 10:30 or 11’o clock in the night and getting back to the show at 8:45 a.m. to the shooting location that is almost an hour or two, given the traffic in Mumbai.

The tragedy starts when the child realizes that he has bitten off more than he can chew and wants to leave, he is treated like a soldier off to fight a war and is told to be brave and fight the good fight. He is told that if he does not suck it up and face the pressure, which ideally a regular child at his age should not be subjected to anyway, he is going to be labeled a ‘quitter.’

And sticking around becomes increasingly difficult when they see their parents who were supposed to be their support structure and morale boosters get involved with the competition themselves, when they see that judges play favorites with the “cuter” kids with “sadder” stories from back home, get away with half-baked acts. Blatant favoritism in the form of judges helping some kids behind camera was not even an issue to the production house, it seemed. Obviously as you can imagine it was big issue for the parents.

The indifference towards the eliminated kids was the most astoundingly glaring, as soon as they were done recording their last video bites about, ‘how are they feeling about making it till here and now they have to go home?’

Almost all the parents I spoke to on the sets said that they regretted having brought their children for the show. An intern on the sets even mentioned that she would never let her child participate in this kind of a show.

I realized my position there soon enough, when I knew that the only thing I have been employed for is to put emotional band-aids once the harm was done on the stage and in the green room to the kids psychological states.

One parent even said that the production house is merely treating this 36 kids as 36 rungs of a ladder leading them to their millions and crores of rupees.

The pressure to entertain the nation, which is put on the kids’ shoulder with the enormous pressure to win, is not what would enrich the kids in anyway. We are wired to see babies, even animal babies, cute, so that we can love and protect them and give them skills enough to deal with life. Let’s not, for our enterntainments sake, make them into a freak show that is cute and get our ‘awwws and oooohs.’

Our kids should mean more to us.

One parent, in hindsight, wisely put it, “The only thing that’s real in these reality shows, is the suffering of the kids.”

Dysfunctional Romance And What Can One Do?

Dysfunctional Romance And What Can One Do?

The feeling of romance just like any other emotion, even though it is the strongest known to us, is just another feeling in the compendium of human emotions. In and of itself, it cannot be judged as good or bad, all we can say is that it is a powerful feeling indeed. The way we experience life as humans is complex and intricate. No emotion by itself can guide courses of healthy actions and almost no logical suggestions to live life seems appealing if it doesn’t take into account our emotions.

 

This age old fight between logic and emotions, the heart and the mind is one of the most tragically false dichotomies that prevail in our culture today. You are presented with a choice of either being exclusively emotional or ruthlessly ‘practical.’ And of course every choice will be judged according to the people you meet and the side they chose in their lives. The combination of logic and emotions, especially in the subject of romance, is really hard to find in the dominant discourse around the matter and its far-reaching consequences. Generally it is not even considered a possibility.

 

Trying to empathetically understand and explain the choices people make is not the same as saying “I agree with them,” but to say “because I don’t agree with a choice you make I will not try to understand it,” is a position that will hinder in gathering crucial knowledge about human behaviour and rectify the choices in question.

 

Recent extremely tragic loss of a talented and budding actor like Jiah Khan, as made public by her alleged suicide note, points at the same problematic and potentially fatal understanding of romance in our culture and its place in our lives. The moment we loose the sight of the idea that ‘emotions are for me, I am not for emotions,’ we loose the whole context and undermine the importance of out lives themselves. Perhaps I understand why Jiah felt the way she did and lost all hopes of any future happiness. Just a read though some of the lines from her suicide note may reveal how it is all too easy to loose the perspective when one is hit by a strong sway of one of the most intense emotions known to human beings; love.

 

“I’ve already lost everything.

I feel dead inside. I’ve never given so much of myself to someone or cared so much. 

I can’t eat or sleep or think or function. I am running away from everything. The career is not even worth it anymore.

I have no confidence or self-esteem left,

I wish you had loved me like I loved you.

I am nothing. I had everything. I felt so alone even while with you. You made me feel alone and vulnerable. I am so much more than this.”

 

It is easy to negatively judge Jiah as an ‘extremely sensitive’ person, after reading the above excerpt, however I would like to add that we sometimes become completely different people when we are in love and thick  of unrequited romance. I say that not only as a psychologist, but also a person who can largely be categorized ‘overly’ sensitive, by most standards and who seem to be struggling in mostly just one area of his life; romance.

 

However, my fascination with studying romance; its nature, its causes and its effects, never just stopped at the problems I personally faced, even though they got me interested in the subject in the first place. Relationship counselling, an important part of my work with people, requires me to understand romance as a human phenomenon and not just an individual one. The experiential understanding and text book knowledge that I have applied as a professional in helping couples ensure their emotional health with or without each other, has helped me understand a lot about my own romantic self.  

 

Identity and Self Esteem Crisis

 

Individuals are required to change or merge their names (mostly women) with their spouse after marriage. With names we sometimes psychologically merge or completely give up our identities as individuals when we find ourselves in the throes of passion, marriage or no marriage. Everything our partner says or does, affects us ten folds more compared to most people around us. Their opinion of us suddenly becomes our opinions of ourselves.

 

This ritual of this unnecessary conflation of; who we are and what we want from life as an individual person with another individual’s identity and dreams in life, is performed under the name of love and approval of the society. However, the dysfunctional side of it is when one is unable to find happiness in and through the relationship, one experience a complete loss of sense of who they are or were before they were romantic partners to their lovers. I guess something similar was felt by Jiah when she wrote “I am broken inside. You may not have known this but you affected me deeply to a point where I lost myself in loving you.”

 

When one goes through identity crisis in the negative phases of a relationship one seems to loose faith in their capabilities to deal with the basic challenges of life, they would have easily dealt with before they got into the relationship. This is a textbook marker of low self-esteem. I was very saddened but not surprised when I read Jiah write this line in the alleged suicide note “I have no confidence or self esteem left,”

 

A sense of helplessness builds in, when one tells oneself that they can’t deal with this failure in romance and if they did not make it with their lover or if my love was never returned by him/her in the way I want, life is not worth living. Because life was essentially thought to serve the feeling of romance and not the other way round wherein romance was to be enjoyed by me and in my life as one of the many forms of feelings that I am capable of experiencing.

 

Even though I may claim to have some understanding of the source of Jiah’s immense pain, I am deeply saddened by the choices she made to deal with that pain. I wish she chose differently.

 

I was also equally, if not more, shocked by how some people reacted to the situation. I also wish that people, who were condemning her decisions in vile and angry words as a cowardly act on social networking websites, also made different choices and first attempted to understand the source of her suffering even though we all wish that the realty were different. This understanding is necessary for our society and for us as individuals who sometimes find themselves as failures in life when they fail in love. Hate and disgust for an action do not motivate you to understand that action and learn about it. I wish we could learn to love ourselves a little bit more from this incident, or enough to know that when we face a conflict between the heart and the mind, we have the skills and the will to make the choice to work with both, so that even in the face of potentially crippling effects of love, we find ourselves capable to come out on the other side of the adversity as stronger and wiser versions of ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook, Human Fear and Corporate Management

Facebook, Human Fear and Corporate Management

What can we learn from Facebook about human fears that can help us run better companies and improve interpersonal relationships?

With more than 1 billion users world wide, Facebook is like its own virtual nation. A nation, that promises its citizens an almost unconditional citizenship, with a perceivably elaborate scheme and regulations to protect the rights of its citizens. This article, however, is not about how great Facebook is as a social networking website, it is about discussing one of the most important of many reasons why Facebook is more successful at connecting with you at an individual level and have a relationship to the point, that you don’t remember what you did with your free time, before Facebook came along.

Facebook team, wittingly or unwittingly, have understood the way we as humans are wired for fear and how it drives our lives, and might I add, have found the most ingeniously innocuous ways to address some of those fears. Many world religions and psychologists have talked about those fears in different ways and have worked with them or used them to control or care, depending upon their motives and intentions.

Just like most animals, we are wired to fear scarcity of material resources that make our physical lives possible, and to fear predators that might steal from us or hurt us in more ways than just physical. However the story gets interesting when we talk about the third unique fear that we have as human beings.

The Third Fear: Fear of Lack of Meaning and Significance in and of life itself (FLMSL).

 I call it unique because it requires imagination and we are the only species that have the apparatus that makes imagination and higher level thinking possible; the prefrontal cortex. FLMSL is important to be understood before we can talk and explore and connect it to our virtual relationship with Facebook.

 Let’s do a thought experiment: Think what will happen if you die right now and somehow even though you can not interact with the world you are able to observe it. What you observe is this, after brief moments of grieving even your loved ones move on in life. Some early some slightly later, but eventually everyone’s resilience kicks in and they start going about life as they did when you were there.

 This thought that ‘I don’t mean much in the long and large scheme of things,’ and ‘I am quite dispensable,’ is a rather unpleasant and unsettling thought. To a few it drives them to the famously known ‘existential crisis.’ Let me repeat, it is important for human beings to have Meaning and Significance in and of life itself. We are the only species that advocates pursuit of contentment, however, even in that pursuit we are not satisfied with the amount of contentment we ‘should have’ had to avoid FLMSL.

 The extent of FLMSL can of course vary and manifests itself in many different ways in different people according to their personality types and their past and present choices they have made to deal with it.

 FLMSL shows itself in many ways in our lives: our desire to be loved, our desire to be listened to, our desire to achieve professionally to feel ‘worth it’ to ourselves or showcase the same to others, our desire to excel, our desire to have friends and so on; basically our desire to be visible to others and to ourselves. May be not human mind so much, but human brain understands the evolutionary importance of being liked and talked about and not forgotten and cared for and shared with.

 There are myriad ways in which people can choose to deal with FLMSL. These choices can decide whether the expression and manifestation of this unique fear/desire is healthy for us or not.

 I will constrict the scope of this article to only exploring the more benign expression of this fear/desire. Other expressions like our need to insult others, our need to not just shine but also out-shine others, our habit of talking over others, our ways of being ‘liked’ by association with other ‘liked’ people, our easily offended ways of interacting with the world, our need to control others either through domination or submission, our need to desperately hold on to a relationship that is obviously not good for us and many other ways in which FLMSL can run amok. That’s a topic for another post.

 That noted, let’s get back to how Facebook addresses FLMSL. Facebook addresses our need/desire of having a meaning and meaning something to ourselves and others, in different ways and intensity in our lives. It not only let’s you express through your postings what’s important to you it gives the avenue for it to be ‘liked,’ ‘shared’ and ‘commented’ upon.  The classical textbook ways of making people feel important.

 Facebook gives you visibility, albeit virtual but a strong psychological perception of visibility and importance nonetheless. It lets you gauge the extent of your importance through the visibility of your posts, pictures and your videos. Thereby implicitly answering the question, do I matter? Do I have meaning?

 Is it not the same thing that we are looking for in our relationship with other human beings? And feel disillusioned and dis-interested when we don’t feel welcomed and important in their lives? Is that why Facebook starts to be a more real relationship tool, through which we achieve a non-judgmental and yet a reassuring platform to present and showcase ourselves?

 It is almost like we use Facebook as an impact-assessing tool. How much do I mean and affect the world around me, sometimes also counted through the number of people and/or achievements I can showcase on my wall. The way when Hulk in the movies, hits the floor with his fist the impact fades out as the distance from his fist increases, the same way for us the greater our impact travels the better we feel.

We can imagine what we would feel like if these numbers matched our Facebook posts.

It then doesn’t come as a surprise that the most preferred professions or positions are the ones that provides us with the most visibility, which puts us front and center of public admiration, a movie star or Queen of England. One important way we also measure the net worth of a star is, with the impact and reach he or she has on a global scale.

Some individuals need the stage of an Academy Awards Ceremony to feel like they have never felt before, some just need that psychological stage being provided to them by their loved ones, but we all desire it.

 Objectively speaking, when outside triggers like friends, family and bosses & team members at work address FLMSL by giving our humanness a holistic visibility and importance, the happiness quotient of the individual goes up and it stays up (with minimum fluctuations) when the FLMSL is addressed from within the individual. When the individual has converted his need for meaning and significance in life to a flexible desire. From “I need people to listen to me, and if they don’t, either I am bad or they are horrible” to “It’s highly desirable that people listen to me, but if they don’t, I can still manage to be happy.’

 Corporations understand this today more then ever before that a happy person is a more productive person. In leadership training, we need to see if the team leaders, managers and even team members are able to make each other feel visible and important in real, relevant and meaningful ways.

 Do people in your team and department feel they are ‘Liked’ and appreciated or corrected in ways that are likeable? Are they being ‘Commented’ upon in ways that are genuine and holistic view of them? Are their success stories or challenges being ‘Shared’ in ways that are learning and problem solving and not blaming?

 So if we want to slow down the attrition rate of good people in our companies and in our private lives, especially because of preventative reasons, we might want to look at the way Facebook addresses a uniquely human need of wanting to matter.

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