‘You are killing your kids’: framing and impoliteness in a health makeover reality TV show

Abstract

Honey We’re Killing the Kids is a reality television programme that addresses the childhood obesity epidemic in two ways: by providing expert health education to individual families, and by packaging these families’ experiences as ‘makeovers’ for public consumption. Honey We’re Killing the Kids (hereafter: Honey) aired in the United States in 2006 and 2007 on TLC (The Learning Channel) and in Canada on The Food Network; the show was developed and originally aired in the UK; Australia and New Zealand also produced versions. Honey has become perhaps best known for a focal scene that occurs in every episode: Parents of children with bad health habits — and the at-home viewing audience — are presented with larger-than-life, morphing computer-generated images that predict how the children will look as they mature to age 40, given a nutrition expert’s analysis of their current physical health and everyday habits. In speaking with the parents in this scene, the nutrition expert directly, and very negatively, evaluates the children’s health habits and tells parents ‘you are killing your kids’. Following an understanding of impoliteness as tied to identity (e.g., Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2009), the expert’s discourse is readily interpretable as ‘impolite’: It questions and undermines the parents’ positions (in this case, as ‘good parents’).