These parents are walking right into a trap.
On the new ABC reality series “The Parent Test,” premiering Dec. 15 at 10 p.m., families willingly take turns in the hot seat, allowing others to critique their childrearing philosophies — from helicopter and high achievement to free range and child-led — across a series of challenges.
“With small children, the world is a spectator sport. Everyone is looking to see if your children are going to behave,” parenting expert Dr. Adolph Brown, who co-hosts the show with Ali Wentworth, told The Post.
In each episode, Brown, 53, and Wentworth, 57, sit in a room with all the moms and dads. Each set of parents take turns letting the group see how their children behaved in various situations, such as being encouraged to jump off of a high dive at a pool, going to a fancy restaurant or responding when a stranger knocks on their door. Then, the judging begins. Every few episodes, the parents vote on which styles should advance forward. In the end, one style will emerge victorious and win the honor of being deemed “the best” way to raise a child. There’s no cash prize, but the feeling of smugness is priceless.
While the hosts can’t say which parenting styles reveal themselves to be most successful– lest they spoil things — Brown said “I think that all the styles had merit. The issue was what style would be the best when it comes to the overall life of the child – that child going into the world and being a full functioning citizen – healthy, happy, kind.”
In his own life, Brown, a father of eight, most closely identifies with the “high achievement” approach. “But, any style that takes into consideration fun, being fair, being firm, along with being flexible is going to be [more efficient]. So that’s kind of what I was looking for,” he said. “In the fine dining challenge, I knew that parents that didn’t have firm consistency, structure, limits and boundaries would have an issue.”
One of the more polarizing approaches on the show is the New Age style espoused by Sara and Michael Wynne, of Thousand Oaks, Calif. Their video footage portrays the parents smiling as their three kids, ranging from age 4 to 8, run wild around the house and jump on the furniture, as the parents seemingly don’t do much to intervene. The Wynnes admitted to being a bit nervous about having their life’s work critiqued; their children, for example, simply declined to participate in one of the challenges — raising more than a couple pairs of eyebrows.
“We do things our way, and sometimes our way can be looked at as, ‘That’s crazy,’” Sara, 41, a realtor and makeup artist, told The Post. “We don’t [say], ‘Don’t do this, don’t be this way.’ We’re open to learning from our children, as much as we want them to learn from us. We keep an open mind, and that could possibly be misinterpreted.”
She said that she went into the show with more than a few notions about certain parenting styles.
Wentworth, who has two teen daughters with husband and “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos, said that she learned a lot hosting the show.
“It’s a really interesting psychological test,” she said. “If you look at parenting as a stew, in our case, there’s myself and my husband George, and we each bring different things to it. He’s a more disciplined parent than I am. I’m a helicopter parent, not necessarily in all the great ways. I let my fears about the world get [to] me. I have a little bit of new age in me in terms of having my kids learn by their own experiences, and George definitely has high achievement parenting in him. The funny thing is that somewhere in the middle, there’s a great balance.”