Reality Television

Reality television has never really played a big role in my life. Growing up with a Mexican family, the only thing close to reality television that has been watched in our household is novelas, or Mexican soap operas. My mom would always, and still does, watch them each and every night until the last one was over. They never caught my attention, until now. Ever since I got with my girlfriend, she would spend her afternoons watching them. When I would go visit her and my son, her whole family would be in the living room watching their novelas. I didn’t pay much attention to them, but one day I finally gave them a chance. It got really interesting and I have been watching them with her ever since. Even though we all know reality TV is fake, it can still catch a person’s attention with suspense and just wanting to know what’s going to happen next.

                Another thing that my girlfriend got me into watching is Teen Mom. Being teen parents ourselves, we figured we would give the show a chance to see if we could relate to anything going on in the show. As stated before, it’s all fake. The reason we started watching it was to see if we could relate, but that was definitely not the case. In the show, the mom and dad of the baby are either no longer together, or there is always some kind of problem with the dad not being there for the baby. I think these types of shows are bad for the society. They are bad for the society because they make dads, or at least teen dads, look like bad people.

                As soon as I saw that they were making the dads look bad, I tried to avoid the show as much as possible. The reason being that I am a teen dad myself and I act nothing like they make us look on TV. They make the dad look like a mean and aggressive person that doesn’t want to be with the mom or just doesn’t want to be a dad. I became a dad at the age of 18 and I am now going on 20 and I’m still with my girlfriend and our almost 2 year old baby. What these shows do is try to make people believe that, if you have a baby at a young age, you will either leave the mom or just leave both of them and not be there for either one of them. By doing that, it gives females the belief that there is not one guy out there that they can trust and be with for the rest of their life. In my opinion, instead of making the guys look bad, they should do a show called Teen Parents, which shows both of the parents still being together and still being there for their son or daughter and going out of their way to do whatever they can to make their baby live a good and healthy life.