Criticism
Before being broadcast, the program received bad publicity as it was seen to be immoral to allow inexperienced teenagers to look after real babies. However, the BBC assured viewers that the parents of the babies had given consent, and that a nanny was on hand at all times to intervene if need be.
In actuality, when the show aired in the UK, few parents intervened even when their babies were extremely upset, and the nannies gave controversial advice, including letting babies "cry it out". One older baby was refused a clean nappy because he had been potty-trained before the show started, even though such a regression is only to be expected when babies are traumatized by separation from their primary caregivers.
Read more about this topic: The Baby Borrowers
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)