Without the Kardashian sex scandals, the Thompson-Shannon household’s focus on family values is showing us how it’s done

By Tara Nykyforiak
Photos by K. Babineau

“Nobody can be proper and etiquettely all the time, I don’t care who you are,” says June Shannon, mother of the outspoken and opinionated Alana Thompson, star of TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Living in small town Mc-Intyre, Georgia, Honey Boo Boo and her family are chronicled in their day-to-day lives with some of their time spent planning for and attending beauty pageants that Alana participates in. Unlike their Toddlers & Tiaras counterparts (the show that first introduced us to Honey Boo Boo), the show displays a strong family unit and parental practices that are lacking in other reality television shows and society as a whole.

Many children today live a sedentary lifestyle. Leisure activities revolve around sitting in front of screens and are, for the most part, indoors. This is vastly different from previous generations, who could be found outdoors and actively sporting grass stains and bruises. Honey Boo Boo and her family, on the other hand, can consistently be seen partaking in activities outside of the house; they can be found swimming in lakes, jumping in mud, and running around their yard. This is very different from the children of comparable TV shows, such as Toddlers & Tiaras, whose lives are shown to be indoors, for the most part, either at the pageants they attend or inside their bedrooms.

These children’s disconnection from nature parallels most children of the present generation; they aren’t given the chance by their parents to explore and use their imaginations to create their own fun.

The family also exhibits a genuine closeness, with Shannon involving her children in the majority her daily undertakings. The family adopts budgeting in order to support Honey Boo Boo’s pageants, and uses coupons and auctions as a means of saving money. The whole family clips coupons together, and also go to auctions as an entire family unit. Through activities such as these, not only is Shannon instilling in her children the value of money and budgeting strategies, but she is also getting them actively involved in helping to manage the household.

This can be further extended to the family’s eating habits. I will not pretend to find their eating habits healthy (they are regularly seen eating copious amounts of junk food), but
Shannon does make her children help with cooking dinners.
I am a firm believer that “a family that eats together, stays together,” and this practice is alive and well in the show.

Many families in contemporary society operate on hectic schedules and do not eat together as a family unit. Honey Boo Boo and her family are always seen eating together at the same time in the same room of the house, and I do believe this exemplifies the importance of making time for family, not normally seen on other reality shows.

A final admirable quality Shannon’s refusal to pressure her children into living up to some ideal standard of appearance or behaviour. Media puts a lot of pressure on young girls and women to appear physically polished and refined. Honey Boo Boo can be seen subverting this expectation, proudly grabbing at her stomach and loudly expressing her opinions with no regard to how she might be judged. All the while she is wholly supported by her mother’s opinion that “we like to be ourselves, you like us or you don’t like us, we just don’t care.”