Against the odds, producers keep trying programs about parenting
Originally published in Current, Dec. 21, 1998
By Joellen Perry
Which is a more valuable skill: making a perfect souffle or raising a happy, well-balanced child? Judging from the ratio between the two topics on public TV, cooking beats parenting hands down.
Programs on parenting have popped up now and again in the public television repertory, but none has made a lasting impression, and no one claims to have a sure-fire plan. "I'm sure there's a strategy out there," says Alice Cahn, group president of TV, film and video for Children's Television Workshop. "We just haven't found it yet."
Given the topic's relevance to most American adults and public TV's long history with children's programming, parenting shows seem a natural for the industry. The proliferation of publications on parenting and the feedback PTV stations receive from their communities indicates that parents--especially first-timers with young children--are hungry for information, advice and camaraderie. Yet parenting programs, so far, haven't generated large audiences.
"Parents are always saying we need parenting programs," notes one program manager, "but they don't watch them."
The topic poses particular challenges to the medium of television. Among the obstacles are finding a time slot that's convenient for both ultra-busy parents and ratings-conscious programmers, generating significant publicity for a show that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, and addressing the needs of an extraordinarily diverse audience--individuals with an intense need to understand the latest perplexing development in the lives of their own kids.
"As a parent," admits Gerry Richman, father of two and executive producer of Donna's Day, a recently discontinued parenting series from KTCA in Twin Cities, "I don't care about the next stage of development, or the one that came before."
The lure of the subject remains strong, however, and public TV producers are conjuring up new ways to snare this elusive audience. KERA in Dallas hopes to replicate the Lifetime cable network's success with the subject by recruiting its star player, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton. Brazelton, whose Emmy Award-winning series, What Every Baby Knows, ended its 15-year run on Lifetime last year, is negotiating with KERA for a 26-part series on preschool children's health--tentatively titled Childwise and planned for release in 2000.
Both CTW and WGBH, Boston, are investing significant Ready-to-Learn funding in programs that could travel beyond the pale of traditional television in their pursuit of parents. Each of these programs will accompany a children's series, and each organization received an initial CPB grant of $4.2 million in 1995 to fund its parent/child programming. Since then, CTW has received an additional $2 million from CPB, which the corporation anticipates matching for WGBH, according to Susan Petroff, CPB's senior program officer for children's programming.
Despite parenting shows' spotty history, the large grants stipulate that funds be used only for parenting programming, rather than for outreach or workshops for parents. Parents searching for things to do with their preschoolers often use the current RTL programming as a springboard for ideas, says Petroff. What better way, she asks, to facilitate RTL's goal of getting parents involved in their children's education than to create companion series for parent and child?
Given the proven obstacles of putting parenting on PTV, though, producers at both organizations may play with the definition of "programming."
CTW's plans for the parenting counterpart to its storybook-based children's series, Dragon Tales, center on "crafting a successful delivery system," says Cahn. Accommodating parents' notoriously hectic schedules poses a larger challenge, she contends, than concocting riveting programming. "The content is there. We need to distribute it in ways that it finds people at convenient times, rather than them having to seek it out."
CTW's hoping that an integrated media project--due out by fall 1999 and combining television with radio, print and online resources--will be more accessible to parents than traditional television.
At WGBH, producers declined to comment on the progress of the parenting companion to their children's literacy series, Between the Lions, also slated to air by winter 2000. But Petroff says there's no guarantee it will be a standard broadcast series, either. "With digital programming a stone's throw away, there might be another way to get the job done."
"I reach for a book"
Whether traditional or trailblazing, the new parenting ventures have a diverse history of previous PTV parenting efforts to learn from.
CTW and WGBH's parenting projects aren't the first programs designed to capitalize on the success of a related children's program. In 1979-83, Family Communications, producer of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, made eight parenting specials that complemented weekly themes of the children's show. Presented to stations in a package with the children's show, these specials featured the venerable sweater-clad neighbor talking with child development experts on such topics as discipline, competition and superheroes. After running the parenting segments for a few seasons, recalls Sam Newbury, director of production for the Pittsburgh production company, stations weren't inclined to purchase more. "Back then, and still today," says Newbury, parenting programs' weakness in drawing viewers was "a really difficult issue for program managers."
Family Communications has since quit trying to reach parents through long-form broadcast television and now tries to educate parents through workshops, books, pamphlets and the Internet--media flexible enough to accommodate parents' specific and immediate needs. Unlike printed resources, the thinking goes, a television program can't be readily accessible to help parents identify whether their child's sudden rash is chicken pox or simply a heat reaction, or provide guidance on what to do when a toddler swallows a quarter.
"When things fall apart and I don't know what to do," concedes Newbury, father of a five-year-old, "I reach for a book."
How about the Internet? Newbury speculates that a new generation of parents, comfortable enough with the computer to "go there as a first resource," may someday replace books for reference. A number of parenting sites are on the web--Dr. T. Berry Brazleton himself makes online "house calls" at www.babycenter.com. There, parents can plug in their child's age (up to one year) and choose from six categories of common questions--on feeding, motor skills and sleeping, for instance. With a click, parents receive detailed text advice on their particular dilemma, along with answers to a few questions often asked by parents with children of the same age.
In this way, the Internet encompasses the functions of a book and index, guiding parents to the information they need, at the moment they need it. Newbury theorizes that video segments on parenting issues could also stand ready on the web.
There may also be other, unforeseen ways the Internet could serve parents' needs. Its success as a parenting resource, notes Newbury, "awaits both the technology and the development of a significant audience level that's comfortable with it."
Producers of broadcast parenting programs acknowledge that conventional TV and radio can't satisfy "what-you-need-when-you-need-it" information-seekers. Most programs instead have focused on the general themes of parenting, seeking to reassure new parents that they're not alone in their day-to-day struggles.
Bobbi Conner--host, creator and executive producer of public radio's Parent's Journal with Bobbi Conner, now in its 13th year--says her own sense of isolation and helplessness as a new parent inspired her to create the program. "I was absolutely enthralled with having to raise two kids, with no experience but with a deep desire to do the absolute best I could. Therein lies the dilemma for parents. You want to do your very best, but you've never done it, and so you want to hear how other people do it."
CTW's proposed new parenting initiative, says Cahn, shares these impulses. While in the past many families had relatives living nearby who could give their own hard-won advice to anxious new parents, many of those residential communities have disintegrated. Parents today "are looking for that sense of community, of experience and knowledge passed down through generations," says Cahn. How the new shows will build a virtual community where others have failed remains to be seen.
Donna's Day, which stopped production last year after two 13-episode seasons, appealed to busy parents by acknowledging their frantic schedules. In addition to demonstrating projects for parents and children to tackle together, the show encouraged parents to find ways of incorporating children into their daily routines. Host Donna Erickson cautioned parents to recognize that household chores could take twice as long when young children participated, but counseled that the shared time would be well worth the effort, recalls Richman.
The series--which KTCA says it dropped because of limited resources--earned ratings between one and two during its best weekend time slots, says Richman. Cahn speculates that the show's downfall was its characterization as a how-to program. "You can't do 'This Old Parent,'" she contends. "It's more than a how-to." Her ambition for CTW's parenting project is that it replicate the complexity of parenting, and approach "the kinds of conversations parents have on a park bench while watching their kids play."
Parenting Works!, a 13-episode program distributed in 1996 by American Program Service, may be the closest that public TV's gotten to park-bench intimacy. The series took the form of a talk show, gathering a group of eight parents each week to discuss the common trials and tribulations of raising preschoolers. Putting real parents on TV, says the show's producer Katrina Sarson, encouraged respect for an endeavor so ancient it's sometimes taken for granted. "Parents felt good that they were parenting in such a way that someone would put them on TV doing it," she recalls.
By putting real parents and their real-life problems and solutions on center stage, the series' producers (who happen to be a father-daughter team) also sought to dethrone so-called parenting experts. "The show's theme," says executive producer Christopher Sarson, "is that no one knows you, the baby, or your situation any better than you do."
Like CTW's producers, the producers of Parenting Works! felt that broadcast formed only one plank of their efforts to reach parents. They also distributed videotapes, parent handbooks and facilitators' guides for group discussion to local and national parenting organizations.
On-screen discussions, moderated by host Milton Creagh, were designed to mirror parenting support groups--and to encourage parent viewers to join one. By highlighting in-depth conversations rather than prescriptive solutions, the program avoided a quick-fix mentality. "These issues have been going on for many millennia," notes Patricia Libbey, the show's executive director. "We're not all of a sudden going to have parents that don't have bedtime issues. As long as there are kids and parents, it's going to happen."
Universal themes notwithstanding, the importance of representation cannot be underestimated, says Katrina Sarson, who found the diversity of public television's audience to be her biggest challenge. "Parents are so sensitive that they're doing something wrong," she notes. "They are looking to be empowered by a parenting show by being represented and respected on it." Sarson culled through some 400 families in her search to find parents who could accurately--and articulately--represent the public TV audience's diversity in terms of race, economics and family structure.
Sparse cultural representation may have been the undoing for U.S. distribution of Spilled Milk, a preschool parenting program in its fifth season with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. PBS picked up the first two seasons, but, surmises Executive Producer Melanie Wood, probably dropped the show because it didn't accurately reflect the States' diversity.
Disappointing priorities
A further challenge of putting parenting on TV is determining a broadcast time that's both convenient for parents and amenable to programmers. "The how-to slot on Saturday morning is where these parenting series have traditionally ended up," says Susan Petroff, speculating that lack of visibility contributed heavily to their poor performance. "I don't think we've given parenting a fair shot."
But weekends might be exactly when working parents have time for television, and also when they're more inclined to seek enlightenment--rather than pure entertainment--from the tube. Donna's Day generated its highest ratings on weekends. Early weekend mornings are also the best times for The Parent's Journal with Bobbi Conner, says Conner. "If I were a program director, that's when I'd air it," she affirms, since parents--especially those with young children--are likely to be in the habit of rising early.
Parenting programs seeking to break free from weekend broadcasts also encounter resistance from station programmers. "Putting parenting on in primetime would be a huge waste of resources," notes one program manager. "It's just not going to win against football."
Determining an ideal time slot for Parenting Works!, according to Christopher Sarson, posed less of a challenge than galvanizing the public-TV publicity machine to get behind the program. "It's not The Civil War," notes Patricia Libbey. "It's not going to get the publicity that Ken Burns gets."
Without the benefit of a nationally publicized primetime broadcast slot, Parenting Works! relied upon extensive coordination between its national partners--groups like United Way and the National Council on Family Relations--and local PTV stations to get the word out. "Where the two worked well together," says Libbey, "there was a lot of publicity and lots of viewing. One is totally in the hands of the local public TV outreach program, and whether they have time, money or interest." Often, she says, the show's publicity campaign benefited from already-established links between local parenting organizations and PTV stations' outreach staffers.
But even where these partnerships were strong, notes Sarson, factors within the public TV system itself sometimes thwarted the show's grass-roots publicity efforts. Station programmers often don't decide to carry a program until it's too late for local organizations to launch significant publicity campaigns, he says--and when they do decide, they may not inform the producers or presenting stations, which makes it hard to do national publicity.
"It's the tip of what disappoints me about public television," says Sarson, lamenting what he sees as public TV's diminishing commitment to public service in its pursuit of corporate underwriting. "Twenty or thirty years ago, the priorities were that parenting is as important as Ken Burns. It is understandable, but sad."
Call-in: a format that works
Feedback from some local stations indicates that parents not only want information, but that they expect to get it from public television. In Lexington, Ky., and Toledo, Ohio, maintaining connections with community health and child welfare organizations enables PTV stations to produce programs that reflect the top priorities of local parents.
Producer Judy Flavell of Kentucky ETV, whose call-in series on kids' health issues routinely generate substantial prime-time audiences, says the station's outreach activities with local groups are "a catalyst for action." By keeping in touch with local hospitals, for instance, KET discovered that children's asthma attacks were the primary reason parents visited the emergency room. The station's subsequent Kids' Health Call-In program on asthma drew an unprecedented number of calls, recalls Flavell.
Parents in Toledo call local WGTE with "questions they're too embarrassed to ask their doctors," says marketing communications manager Julie Malkin. In response to the steady stream of inquiries from parents of pre- and elementary-school children, the station partnered last month with a regional children's medical center to air a six-hour Sunday marathon of parenting information. "It seemed like a natural thing to do," says Malkin. "People know us and trust us. They were asking the questions."
Cutting-edge technology and complicated delivery systems aside, it's this trust factor that keeps PTV producers intrigued by the topic, and that may carry the new parenting programs through in the end. "PBS is uniquely qualified to do this kind of work," affirms Cahn. "It's the only station parents trust."
The writer, Joellen Perry, is a journalist working in Washington, D.C., and a former editorial associate at Current.
Outside link: Web site of public radio series The Parents' Journal.
Web page created Dec. 29, 1998
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