Once again, the Times delivers a stunner.

But some advice is simplistic or questionable, the experts say, and the families in the shows appear extreme, their children more out of control than those in most American families. Some doctors also worry that endings may not be as happy as they seem and that appearing on the shows may leave some children with emotional bruises.

In other news, a study determined that the television program Blind Date inaccurately depicted the normative interactions between single people who were meeting for the first time, and officials from the U.S. Census released data indicating that the contestants on Fear Factor deviate significantly from the American mean with regard to number of elective surgeries performed before age thirty.