Over the summer, we did a lot of reality TV watching, and I’m totally not ashamed of that (don’t look at me, I’m hideous!). We also let the kids watch a lot of it too, and as a family we really enjoyed American Ninja Warrior…

(Aside about ANW: it is not a fighting show. It’s an obstacle course show with amazing feats of agility and strength and your kids will all want to become rock climbers and get into parkour. I highly recommend it – the finale is on Monday on NBC. You will not be disappointed!)

…and also we watched The Amazing Race Canada, Dance! Show!, and Masterchef. We had extensive family discussions about all these shows, who would win, who should win, who would get eliminated this week. There was also some questionable behaviour on Masterchef in particular, so we talked a lot about how to conduct yourself in a competition and how people might react when faced with conflict, so that was good.

Now all of these have ended, or are ending this week, and poor Captain Jelly Belly in particular is feeling lost. He said to us the other day, “What are we going to watch now? Everything is over!” Don’t get me wrong, he loves a good episode of Phineas and Ferb or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but what he really loves is a competition show, where we can all follow along and pick favourites and make predictions.

Happily, football season is starting and he and Sir Monkeypants do a picks-pool thing where they predict the winners every week, and he likes that. But I thought it might be nice to find him another reality show to watch – what would you recommend for a 10-year-old? I personally am not that interested in the singing competition shows; I find Survivor to be too much of a bad model of human behaviour.

We used to watch a kids’ reality show, In Real Life – maybe it will have a fourth season. And we are no longer regular watchers of The Amazing Race, but I’d let the Captain have another go at that one. Any other suggestions?