Have you heard about the next hot thing in reality TV? NBC’s The Baby Borrowers follows five teen couples who believe they are ready to be parents. The show requires them to grow up—fast. Each couple is set up in a home in a suburban cul de sac. The female must wear an “empathy belly” as the couple attends prenatal classes. Then each couple is given a baby—yes, a real, live, breathing infant—between the ages of 6 and 11 months. For three solid days, each couple must “parent” the baby.

I have no quarrel with reality TV. I don’t care what consenting adults do, by themselves or with each other (even to each other) under the guise of entertainment.

But my heart goes out to these babies. I cannot help but think that if they were able to understand, “Hey, baby, how about you give up your parents and go live with these perfect strangers for three straight days?” that none of them would agree.

Of course, they cannot understand. So when hours pass and they don’t see their mothers, they don’t see their fathers—in short, they don’t see the faces of the people that they associate with their safety, warmth, comfort, and love—what do these babies think? How do they feel? What happens to their sense of security?

You may think my concern is overblown. I can almost hear the comments:

• It’s “only three days.” Yes, you and I are able to understand “three days,” aren’t we? Babies? They can’t. These babies don’t know when—or if—their parents are ever coming back.
• Lots of babies go to daycare; isn’t this the same thing? No, it’s not. Parents usually make sure that their children have a chance to develop a relationship with their child care providers. I don’t see any evidence of that happening here. The pseudo-parent participants are strangers to these babies.
• But my baby stayed with his grandparents over the weekend, and it didn’t hurt him. No, it probably didn’t. After all, your baby’s grandparents are not strangers to him.
• Nothing is going to happen to these babies; the teens will be supervised. On one hand, I agree. The children will be fed, their diapers will be changed. Physically, they will be fine. But what about emotionally and socially? Is it ok for parents to put their infant children through that sort of stress on a lark, for nothing more than entertainment?

You know, when I first heard about this show, even I wondered if my response was over the top. Sure, I’m parenting three children. I think I’m pretty familiar with 6-to-11-month-olds. (My youngest is now six months, three weeks old.) But I checked with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5 just to be sure.

According to the AAP’s experts, babies as young as five- and six-months-old have a strong attachment to their parents and frequent caregivers. They “associate [parents] with [their] own well-being.” From eight to twelve months, babies will feel “great distress” when their parents are not with them. The children will have “so little sense of time” that they will not know “when—or even whether” their parents will return.

The AAP calls on parents to provide a “stimulating, safe environment” for their children, to “give consistent, warm, physical contact…to establish [the] infant’s sense of security and well-being,” and to “avoid subjecting [the babies] to stressful or traumatic experiences, physical or psychological.” I can’t see that the parents of the infants involved in this show are meeting these recommendations.

This show calls itself a “social experiment,” but the fact is that “informed consent” from these vulnerable participants, the babies, is not possible. Maybe there won’t be any long-term side effects. We can’t even be sure about the short-term side effects. But while we don’t know, is this ok? Is this the sort of way parents should be treating their children?