This past Friday, it seemed like everyone was fixated on the "balloon boy," the little boy who supposedly took off in his father's giant weather balloon but was found hiding in the family's attic.  Come Sunday, and we find out the entire thing was a hoax perpetrated by a fame-hungry father, Richard Heene, who was hoping to use the incident as a springboard to their own reality show.

Did somebody say, "Ugh?"

The Heene family was already seen on one reality television series, the trashy Wife Swap, where Richard claimed to be descended from aliens and saw domestic chores as "women's work."  His children were shown swearing, being rude, and flatulating on national TV.  After the show was over, he even had them record a "music video" called (I kid you not) "Not Pussified."  I'll give you a second to watch it, possibly through your fingers while cringing:

Depressing, isn't it? 

But not surprising.  It's just the latest and greatest of TV reality families who use their children to gain money and fame.  It's a who's who of disturbing parenting: the Duggars, the Gosselins, Octomom, and now, the Heenes, who are facing criminal charges for turning something as serious as a missing child into a tax-dollar-wasting publicity stunt.

From Toddlers & Tiaras to Nanny 911, more and more families are trading the privacy of their children's growing (and perhaps embarrassing and awkward) years for the opportunity to be on television.  The parents will drag kids on early-morning interviews, make them lie to the press (6-year-old Falcon Heene told reporters, "...we did it for the show..." by mistake), and humiliate them, all for a little air time.  It's as if these stage moms and dads see their children not as individuals but as extensions of themselves.  Or worse, like pets who can balance a ball on their noses.

What possesses a family to go on Super Nanny and have their children's bad behavior broadcast for the rest of us to tsk-tsk?  Who would go on Wife Swap and subject their children to a bizarre stranger acting as a surrogate mother?  Who would take an out-of-control teen on Maury Povich and have them berated by undereducated adults?  I'll tell ya who: the worst of stage parents, who are dying to be stars, who have no real talents, whose only currency is their kids.  And they'll gladly "spend" the children for just a little tiny glow of those bright lights.

We look at child stars like Danny Bonaduce and can see how fame (or infamy) can stunt the development of a person.  The reality kids have it worse because they aren't playing a character; they are the character, and they are vulnerable.  And worse yet, they never sign up for that.  Parents who should protect their children instead place them in these situations where they are abused... by the media, by their peers, and perhaps by their parents (I argue that little Falcon was psychologically abused).  Someone has to step up and say, "This isn't right.  Children are not dolls."

These poor children are modern-day Gypsy Rose Lees  I think it's time we stop going to the burlesque show.