It’s no wonder that as a whole, today’s teens appear to be wilder and living more on the edge than the generations preceding them when they are watching staggering amounts of television, and most of those shows being reality TV.

On average, a teen will watch 28 hours of television per week, adding up to almost 15,000 hours a year. That’s more hours than they go to school, which is about 11,000 hours a year.

With reality TV being so popular, teens are getting exposed to things like sex, drugs and vulgar language at younger and younger ages. According to the University of Iowa’s Children’s Hospital, each year television exposes youth to more than 14,000 sexual references and jokes.

Many big names in reality TV are out there, from “American Idol,” to “The Bachelor,” to the ever popular “Jersey Shore.” During January’s season finale of “Jersey Shore,” 4.8 million viewers tuned in to watch the supposedly real drama unfold. Shows like these suggest to teens that random hook-ups are OK, or that trying drugs just once won’t hurt you, and how can we not expect teens to follow these examples?

As a society we have idolized being famous and having a lot of money. Everybody seems to strive to be in the limelight, even if it’s just for a short amount of time. How can we not want that for ourselves?

But it’s even worse for the teens of today. They have been exposed to things that two or three generations before them would have never been allowed to see. Our standards for what is acceptable in society have lowered.

You can walk down a high school hall and easily hear several cuss words, a good amount of sexual jokes, and maybe even some talk about drugs or alcohol. That is the type of behavior TV has taught them to be acceptable.

Family values are disappearing in our society, slowly yet surely, and a lot of that blame can be placed on reality TV. Now, children can easily learn morals from TV, even if they aren’t always the best ones. TV can so easily take the place of a parent, teaching kids the “acceptable” ways of society. But in reality, shouldn’t parents be the ones teaching kids what types of behavior are ok and what aren’t? But instead, they have another reality TV show for that, called “Super Nanny.”

As a society, we need to take a step back and look at what we’re doing to our youth. It’s going to take a lot of work to repair the reality TV wave, but we owe it to our youth to do this.

Hope Skeen is a sophomore at Loveland High School. She has been on the city of Loveland Youth Advisory Commission since October 2009.