“Shiny Happy People” and the Great Reckoning That Is Coming

The Impact Reality TV, Social Media, and Blogs Have Made on Kids

Around the year 2000, I had a friend from church who worked on the crew of the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives. My friend asked me if my then-five-year-old daughter could be an extra on the show. Some paperwork needed to be filled out, but then all I had to do was bring my little girl on the appointed day. Having watched the show briefly in high school, I was curious to see the actual set.

When my daughter and I arrived at NBC Studios, we were led through a back lot to a room where makeup artists were busily applying minor “cuts and abrasions” to a group of kids who would be patients in the hospital. For this Christmastime episode, the matriarch in the show, Grandma Horton, would read a holiday story to the bandaged-up kids.

While preparing for the scene, several of the actors came by and greeted us with warmth and felicity. Then the director called for action! Everyone quickly moved into place as the cameras started to roll.

My daughter loved the magic of it all.

After this several folks asked me if I wanted to bring my daughter to more of these kinds of opportunities. They said she had “what it takes”: a photogenic face, an outgoing personality, and a verbal precociousness that made it easy for her to remember and deliver lines.

Living in Los Angeles, this is a fairly normal occurrence. It’s not uncommon for a neighborhood mom to take her kid out of school for the day because they have to shoot a commercial or make a pilot episode. Some kid-actor moms choose to homeschool so they can attend auditions without the encumbrance of school absences. It’s a world that one learns to navigate, but it can quickly become a Hollywood version of a child-sized rat race. And some moms really get into it, paying for private acting lessons and professional headshots, which constantly need to be updated because kids grow so fast.

But I didn’t want my daughter growing up in front of cameras. I wanted her to live a normal life, free from the roller-coaster scrutiny of casting agents and callbacks.

So, somewhere in our attic is a box of VHS tapes with one marked “Days of Our Lives Episode.”

And that was that. A fun day. Nothing more.

Then the early 2000s morphed into a new kind of mom-culture, with mothers taking (and sometimes staging) pictures and videos of their kids to share on blogs and social media. All of the sudden, it wasn’t just a few moms in L.A. who were trying to have their kids “make it” in Hollywood. A major shift had taken place. Moms everywhere were now the main characters, and their kids the supporting cast.

With the advent of digital technology and the rise of free online platforms, moms could easily make a mini reality show of their lives, documenting the day-by-day moments, inspired largely by the new reality shows on TV.

Reality TV was a game-changer. These reality shows normalized the act of filming ourselves and our kids while allowing anyone in the world to watch.

A popular show originally called 17 Kids and Counting took off in 2008 and focused on the Duggar family, an ultra-conservative Christian household that advocated homeschooling and a certain type of family structure. As the show grew in ratings, the family grew to 19 kids, with televised births of the newest babies and camera-filled weddings of the oldest kids who were barely out of their teens.

I never watched an episode because we didn’t have cable television (and still don’t). My husband and I chose early on not to have a television set as the centerpiece of our home, but we did own a TV and DVD player so we could watch movies on occasion. I heard about the Duggars from friends who were big fans. My friends said I would like the Duggars because they didn’t let their kids watch much television either, despite the fact that they were on television.

In many ways, the Duggars harkened back to an earlier time: the girls wore only dresses, complete with pantaloons; the older kids helped care for the younger kids; and all the kids had chores. What’s not to like? It seemed harmless enough, except for maybe the ban on denim jeans.

For Gen X girls like myself, who grew up reading Little House on the Prairie and watching countless reruns of the Ingalls family working happily together, the overall tone of the Duggars’ reality show was appealing on many levels — not the least of which was a parenting style that promised well-behaved docile children.

But as the new docuseries Shiny Happy People attests, there were stories behind the pictures that few people ever knew. A dark side to this particular brand of portrayed innocence lurked behind the scenes. Before the first episode ever aired, the parents knew their oldest son had molested some of their younger daughters, but they pressed forward with the reality show anyway, presenting a picture of mild-mannered children as the reward for their diligent parenting skills, which they attributed to an organization called the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and its homeschool curriculum Advanced Training Institute (ATI) led by Bill Gothard.

In the docuseries, one of the older daughters Jill Duggar Dillard shared what it was really like. As kids, they didn’t have a choice in being filmed. Their father received all the monetary compensation. And their oldest brother was allowed to continue living with the family after a brief stint at a religious “rehabilitation facility” that was kept very hush-hush.

When news of the sexual abuse broke in 2015, Jill and her sister were interviewed by Fox News. The clip from this interview show young girls parroting the narrative their parents had coerced. The sexual abuse was minimized and dismissed, no criminal charges would stick (due to a statute of limitations), and a spiritually abusive culture of “forgive and forget in the name of God and grace” prevailed. (Years later, however, the oldest brother Josh Duggar would be sentenced to prison for possession of child pornography.)

The network canceled the show but then started a spinoff with the older girls called Jill & Jessa: Counting On. Jill recounts her deep desire not to have the birth of her first child filmed, but the network and her controlling parents overruled her. The docuseries then shows brief snippets of a young Jill laboring and giving birth in a televised episode.

Giving birth is a deeply vulnerable experience in a woman’s life, and her privacy should be respected.

But nothing about these children’s lives were respected.

The children were exploited, even after they were grown, while the parents gained a fortune.

The whole thing is heartbreaking.

And yet, between 2008 and 2015, when the Duggar family was on TV, an entire mom-culture exploded online. I was blogging during those years, and I had noticed a strong presence of mommy bloggers who portrayed a modern-day-Laura-Ingalls vibe. Some blogs were filled with pictures of aproned girls rolling bread dough in the kitchen and young boys helping their father in the barn.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with making bread or doing farm chores, but when kids are photographed and used to promote a certain lifestyle so Mom can grow her online audience and possibly sell more books, something is off.

Children are too small to know what is happening. They don’t have the maturity to understand the far-reaching consequences of having their lives documented online for the sake of their parents’ career, and they didn’t sign up to be models and props.

Back then I didn’t see the connection between these bloggers and the Duggars’ reality TV show, but the docuseries Shiny Happy People helped to connect the dots, even if that wasn’t its main purpose.

It’s also important to note that Shiny Happy People is not a criticism of all homeschooling; rather, it focuses on the shortcomings specifically associated with IBLP and ATI. Over the years I’ve known some wonderful Christian families who, I would say, homeschooled with excellence. I’ve also known of situations where I did not think it was done with excellence.

The health of each homeschooling experience depends on the parents.

My own kids are grown now. My youngest starts college this fall. But if I had small kids today, I would probably homeschool them, not out of a religious conviction, but an educational one. I’m a credentialed educator, licensed to teach in the public school system, and I’m deeply concerned by what I’m seeing in classrooms where internet-connected screens are ubiquitous. (I’ll write more on this soon.)

So, this is not an indictment against homeschooling. Not at all. My purpose in discussing this docuseries — which is worth watching even though it is at times disturbing — is to help us see that these types of reality TV shows, as well as the online world of blogs and social media, created a subculture that thrived at the expense of children. And when we watch these reality TV shows and read these blogs and follow these Instagram influencers, we are complicit.

Where does this leave those of us who have perhaps participated in these types of online venues in the past?

Firstly, we must remember that the internet came to us without a user’s manual. My generation especially has stumbled and fumbled along as we tried to keep up and figure out the ever-expanding types of technology available at our fingertips.

Secondly, there isn’t a biblical commandment that says, “Thou shalt not post pictures of kids online.” I think in this kind of situation, Paul’s message to the Corinthians is apt when he says that some things may be permissible, but that doesn’t mean all things are beneficial (1 Corinthians 6:12). Ultimately, it has to be something we each need to consider for ourselves and our own family.

Thirdly, we can follow #44 in my 50 Things article and not let past mistakes bury us in shame. There is grace for you and me.

I can remember posting pictures on my personal Facebook profile back in 2009 of a family trip we took to Sea World and Lego Land in San Diego. I didn’t do this kind of thing often and quit shortly afterwards, but I do understand the cultural pull to conform and be like everybody else.

This is why I admire the younger generations today who are catching on and choosing to live differently. One young Christian author and Substack writer, Chris Martin, who writes extensively about the dangers of social media, shares why he and his wife have chosen not to post any pictures of their children online. It’s worth the read.

Other young families are choosing a similar but alternative path, where they may post pictures of themselves, but they overlay a graphic, like a heart, to cover their child’s face in the photograph. In this way, more young parents today are actively protecting their kids from being filmed and posted online. I think this is very wise, and I hope more young people decide to follow suit.

For two decades millions of people have been uploading images of their kids to the Internet, and a great reckoning is due. Documentaries like Shiny Happy People are, I suspect, just the beginning of the reckoning that is coming now that these much-photographed kids are growing up.

I’ve named this Substack newsletter The Quiet Contrarian because I sense a deep need to live counter to the culture around us, but it’s important that we’re not contrary just for the sake of being contrary. The Duggar family was extremely contrary to the wider pop culture around them, so contrarianism in itself — especially if it’s merely an outward display — is not the answer.

The answer is not in branding ourselves as different than the mainstream culture. Nor is it even in creating a so-called Christian subculture. The answer is in becoming more like Christ. The more we look to Jesus and conform to him through the power of his Word, the more we will automatically seem different. Not because of the way we fix our hair or wear our clothes, but because of the way our hearts have been changed.

As Christ followers, our message is not a guaranteed parenting formula that promises to produce obedient children. That is just another form of the prosperity gospel, which I’ve written about here.

Our message is that our hearts were ill. We were bent towards wrong things. And there was no formula that could fix us. But God in his mercy came to us and took upon himself all of our wrongdoings. He bore the punishment that we could not bear, and because of his sacrifice on the cross, we can be made new.

This is our message, so let’s tell it straight, because these are the real days of our lives, and we overcome the dark powers of this world “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of [our] testimony” (Revelation 12:11). Pictures of our kids are not required.

Shalom.

Denise