Dream Family

This is Taiwan’s first reality show that highlights the parent-child relationships in Taiwanese society. It focuses on three main themes: smartphone addiction, pet care, and emotional distress. Mobile phone addiction is the biggest problem. Dream Family tries to change this situation through social experiments: two middle school students with smartphone addiction switch parents, temporarily leaving their original families and going to a family with no restrictions on phone use. They live in their new homes for eight days, experiencing different family routines and lifestyles. Will this experiment really show the severity of smartphone addiction on children? Will the children choose to put down their mobile phones after the experiment? Will families learn new ways of communicating and have the opportunity to improve parent-child relationships? The undertaking of the experiments was not without difficulties: it was very hard to find families willing to expose their lives and problems on camera, especially during the pandemic. Capturing the emotional ups and downs of the children and presenting the details of the experiment in a candid and natural way also proved to be a great task, but the end results were well worth it.