Jo Frost: Nanny On Tour

Jo Frost: Nanny On Tour is an American reality television series, themed around parenting skills, hosted by British nanny Jo Frost. The series ran for 10 1-hour long episodes from January to March 6, 2016 on Up TV. Jo Frost also serves as a producer on the show.

Background
The series uses a similar theme that was used in Supernanny, which has Frost traveling to a new city each week and work with one family that desperately needs her expertise. Prior to her arrival, Frost monitors the family’s behavior from her mobile RV office through the use of surveillance cameras through the consent of the family after they agree to have it placed throughout their home. Once she sees their weaknesses and errors, Frost helps the families come up with tools and techniques in order to improve their parenting skills, maintain their discipline and relationship with their children, and to keep in touch through progress reports. In addition, Frost also travels to communities where she seeks out help from people looking for advice from family issues to becoming better parents.

Spivey Family Controversy and Jo Frost Backlash
When Jo visited the Spivey Family. An African-American Family in Georgia. In Episode 4 "Tech Overload", when she was away, CCTV cameras caught the father, Chris, allegedly hitting his son Marcus (9) who has Autism, in his room behind Marcus’ door, with his belt after Marcus took his phone charger. Chris defended himself claiming he didn't hit Marcus with the belt, and insisted he was crying because he was scared, although he did admit to using it in the past. Due to it being behind closed doors, its unknown if Chris actually hit Marcus. however after hearing it, Jo was shocked and contacted the DCFS (Department of Children and Family services), which is the only time she’s ever told authorities about abusive parents. Entertainment Tonight, who covered the story, contacted the the department as well. Jo felt so strong about it she aired a message after the episode talking about how corporal punishment is a bad way to discipline kids.

Many people were siding with Jo on this, and Chris was considering on taking legal action against Jo because of death threats he received on Facebook by fans who were outraged he did this, some actually said he should’ve been the one receiving the belt. Despite the outcry for Chris to be arrested, he was not, due to corporal punishment being legal on Georgia

Even though the controversy ended sometime after it started, around 2019-2020 many fans begun criticising and turning against Jo. This is mainly due to how they begun to realise that with the exception of the Spivey’s no other abusive parent such as Phil from The Davis Family (Season 5) were reported to any type of authority, or informed of them by her. In the case of Phil, he was given abuse counselling, although Phil being arrested is quite unlikely, as according to multiple sources, he has changed his ways. Parents who were hated yet never abused their kids like Lisa Daniels and Holly Tafoya (Even though she used Soap on James) were wanted behind bars.

A few even went as far as to claim that Jo’s report was an act of racism, due to the Spivey's being a black family, and heavily criticised the fanbase for not calling Jo out on this before. Some fans fought back against the haters, saying they didn’t need to call Jo out on this, as she knows what she’s doing, and likely didn’t want authorities to get involved with the episodes and have parents get arrested. However did criticise Jo, due to her reporting the family, basically being meaningless. This would lead into a major debate, between the fans and those who were against Jo, where they fought over wether or not she should’ve done what she did to the spiveys to the aforementioned other abusive parents she’s come across.

Despite the fans fighting back, all of this resulted in Jo receiving major backlash for how she’s been letting parents abuse their kids, and not telling authorities about it for so long. Which also resulted in the fans that criticised her, quitting the show all together.

Trivia

 * This is mostly considered to be one of the worst Supernanny spin-offs, due to the Spivey Family controversy

Internal Links

 * Nanny on Tour Wiki