IF YOU have not seen this cable TV show, I encourage you to catch it. I’ve watched it the past few weeks and seen several episodes. It is an amazing show, a cut above the typical “reality” television show.

World’s Strictest Parents is a one-hour show that appears on CMT, the Country Music Channel. It will soon be shown on MTV as well, so it should be reaching an entirely new audience shortly.

The show takes two troubled teens, a boy and a girl who don’t know each other, but who both have big problems with their parents or parental figures. They are rebellious. They are contemptuous. They are well on the path to becoming full-time losers who never grow up and never learn how to appreciate those who provide for them.

The show is an hour long, and begins each week with a look at the conflict the teens have with their parents or guardians. It shows their lack of respect, their lack of following rules, their refusal to either obey their parents or discuss meaningfully chores, school, privileges or behaviors. It reveals the parents of the rebellious teens at wit’s end.

The two teens are then taken to the home of a strict family, where they are to remain for a week. These families have a mom and dad who are in control of their home and their kids. Their kids have rules of conduct and rules of work. They are expected to contribute to the family endeavors, and that means everyone works toward common goals.

THE PARENTS in these strict families prove that good parents have to set rules and enforce them. They prove that confronting recalcitrant teens directly, requiring them to talk about their rule violations, and insisting that the rules will be followed produces kids a cut above those who are reared without such parameters.

The strict parents lay down the rules and typically put the teens to work. Usually, these are teens with no work ethic at all. They don’t lift a finger in their homes, and that’s part of their problem — they don’t understand that life doesn’t owe them a roof over their head, food on their table, clean clothes, or all the other goodies of life. These strict parents enforce the notion that everyone in the family, to the youngest child, has a duty to carry their share of the load.

As you might imagine, there is terrific resistance by the wayward teens in the beginning, but with patience and commitment to their rules, the strict parents gradually make headway with those two kids. You can see the two kids begin to glow as they discover a life that includes parental figures who are on the job as parents every day. These parents never phone it in. They are tireless making their points and not letting teens wear them down. They use chores to wear down the teens.

Toward the end of the week, the two teens each get a letter from their parent or parents. Often, there is no father in the picture, and it’s obvious that’s part of the problem.

Whether it is by death or abandonment, girls and boys without a daddy in their life are often troubled kids. Those years are hard enough on a kid from a family with both parents actively involved in the child’s life.

USUALLY, by the time the two teens are picked up by their parents or guardians, there is a noticeable difference in the behaviors and demeanor of the two teens. The week has helped them immensely. The love and concern the strict parents demonstrate to the teens during their week assures the teens that behavior requirements are intended to improve them, not punish them. These kids cry out for more structure, and more parental authority, not less. The parents visit with their teen and the strict parents at the end of the week’s show. The strict parents give some pointers to the teens’ parents.

It is important to give kids a great deal of freedom in their actions and thoughts. However, I am generally in agreement with the approach of the strict parents in this show. Children need boundaries, and it is their nature to test those boundaries. Good parents have to be willing to suit up and play every day. Kids naturally press for their independence, but we are the adults. We must be the adults to show them how to become adults. World’s Strictest Parents is really about the parents who need to learn how to parent, and it provides tutorials on how to be a better parent.

© 2009, Jim “Pappy” Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Jim “Pappy” Moore is a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com