Suffer the little children to appear on TV?

LAUGHTER echoes around Jojo Donaldson’s bustling home, the children jostle around the kitchen table and giggle wildly at their mum’s jokes.

It’s a normal day in the Donaldson household... well, as normal as can be now the Wife Swap cameras have left the family’s South Queensferry home branded "dirty, dirty, dirty" before nearly five million astonished viewers.

They tuned in to see the cameras dismantle Jojo’s "healthy neglect" style of parenting, homing in on bits of food discovered rotting behind children’s beds, the shopping trolley apparently dumped in the living room and the plate of stale muffins that appeared to have taken root in the kitchen.

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And they may have heartily agreed when Dawn Eastell, the super-clean mum-of-two drafted in to replace Jojo at her High Street home, fumed: "I have cleaned up more rotten, bacteria-ridden food from the back of your children’s beds than any mother should allow. Grow up! You’re an adult and a mother."

But, as the Donaldson children are eager to testify, you can’t believe all you see on television...

Today, nearly two weeks after they settled down with their friends in the local village hall to watch themselves starring in the Channel 4 hit reality programme, life in the Donaldson home is just as it always was - except for one thing.

"We appreciate our mum much more," declares 11-year-old Ciara. "Being on Wife Swap makes me think she is a better mum."

Which may not be what everyone who watched the programme might think. Jojo, 38, emerged as slothful, lazy and quite content to allow her children - Ruaridh, 13, Ciara, 11, eight-year-old Eilidh and two-year-old Fynn - to fend for themselves while she apparently lazed the mornings away in bed.

"We never iron, we fold carefully," she declared in the household manual left for her rival, adding: "I don’t do breakfast and I don’t do lunch - the kids make their own packed lunches and get breakfast for themselves. The kitchen floor gets mopped whenever." In true Wife Swap style, her "rival" emerged as a cleaning dynamo who couldn’t hide her distaste at the messy home.

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None of which surprised Jojo. "I knew when I arrived at Dawn’s house in Doncaster and saw the cleanest house on the planet exactly what was happening: she was the very, very clean one and that would make me very, very dirty. It was clarty versus clean.

"What’s more important? A clean house or happy children?"

She is far from bitter at how she has been portrayed. Instead, she is using the Wife Swap experience as material for the Fringe show she is writing. "For me, the programme was purely and simply a tool to make fun from," she says.

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Partner Allan, 41, who works for computer giant Sun Microsystems in Linlithgow, has no regrets either - even though the programme omitted to inform viewers that he has a job, making him appear lazy and unemployed.

But while Jojo and Allan have emerged unscathed from their brush with the Wife Swap experience, what of the children?

Scots psychologist Dr Cynthia McVey fears reality television shows such as Wife Swap may well have a negative impact on some children who find themselves playing a starring role in mum and dad’s exposure as either poor parents or filthy homemakers.

"To begin with, usually they haven’t given their permission for all this to happen. Their parents might have said: ‘We’re doing this, do you mind?’ but ultimately the parents have the control.

"The thought of having a strange person in your household - not just a visitor, but someone who is determining how you behave and laying down rules - might be quite a challenge for young people.

"Their home is private territory and they have private emotions that are going to be exposed. There must be an impact there."

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So while the television cameras focused on Jojo and Dawn, and Allan and his Doncaster counterpart, Gary, what impact did Wife Swap have on the children?

Here, the forgotten people at the heart of the programme - the children - reveal what happened when they experienced "mum swap".

REBECCA CLARK, 12

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"Jojo looks after me after school on Mondays to Thursdays but on the first day the cameras were there I was told to hide and I wasn’t allowed to meet Dawn.

"I met her on the second day and she seemed all right, but as time went on I could see that all she cared about was cleaning.

"When the rule change happened, it was: ‘Dawn does absolutely everything’.

It was okay that she gutted the house but some of the things that she said to Allan were very unreasonable.

"I was mostly glad when she left, because she wasn’t half like Jo: she didn’t do anything Jo did and only cared about cleaning.

"The show definitely proved the amount of editing that was done because some of what they showed about what the house was like first, happened when Dawn was there!

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"I’m really glad Jo looks after me and I wouldn’t settle for anyone else!"

RUARIDH, 13

"I wanted to go on Wife Swap because it was a chance to go on telly which was quite cool. I thought that there would be a big camera crew but there was only one camera.

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"But on the first night Dawn said to us: ‘Your mum’s not a real mum’.

"It wasn’t a very nice thing to say. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her on the first day.

"I was really angry because she was in our house and acting as if she was perfect and that my mum was really dirty.

"But my mum has got a much better personality and it’s better to have that than have all this cleaning going on.

"It was really strange because Rebecca, the girl mum looks after when school finishes, wasn’t even in the programme once.

"Under mum’s rules, we had chores to do. Me and the girls were always getting asked to do a chore so they could film it and we ended up doing double the chores we normally do. Then at rule change [when Dawn was allowed to run the household as she thought it should be] we were told there’d be no chores for us kids, we’d get everything done for us. Monkey - the name we call Allan - had to do DIY, there’d be no cereal apart from at breakfast (I was gutted!), and bed at 9pm.

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"We liked the rules apart from the ‘one bowl of cereal a day’ and ‘bed at nine’. Anyway, the film crew took so long to do the video diaries that we ended up going to bed at 10.30pm. I got bored of them always asking me what kind of mum I would like.

"A lot of the programme was really misleading. They kept showing a plate with some muffins on it which made it look as if they’d been lying there for ages - which they hadn’t.

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"And they made out that our rooms were really messy but my room isn’t. It’s the GIRLS’ room that’s messy.

"The things people say most at school are: ‘What’s with the trolley in the living room?’ I’m getting sick of telling them it’s part of my mum’s stage act.

"The programme doesn’t really make me appreciate my mum any more than I did before - I already knew what she was like."

CIARA, 11

"I wanted to do it because I had seen it on TV and we all thought it would be cool.

"But it didn’t kick in that my mum would be away for ten whole days.

"It felt really strange having a camera around 24/7 but after about day six I got used to it.

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"My favourite part was doing the video diaries, I felt like a contestant from Big Brother in the diary room just talking to a camera.

"I quite liked Dawn but she never took us anywhere and the only time she left the house was to go to the paper shop to get sweets for my little sister, Fynn.

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"When I saw what she said about my mum on the programme I didn’t like her any more. It sort of made me angry but I’m not bothered now.

"My friend Rebecca, who my mum looks after Monday to Thursday, was here for most of the Wife Swap but she wasn’t even on the programme which we all thought was strange.

"Friends at school have been making a lot of jokes about it - the ironing and stuff.

"They keep copying Dawn and saying: ‘Don’t touch that Ciara, it’s DIRTY!’

"Life hasn’t changed much since the swap, except it does all make me think that my mum is a better mum than Dawn."

EILIDH, 8

"We normally watch Wife Swap and when they called us we said: ‘Yes!’ but we didn’t know how hard it would be.

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Dawn was kind and nice to us - she did everything for us - but she wasn’t nice to Monkey. He wasn’t very happy with her and because she stopped him doing anything in the house, he felt a bit rejected in his own home.

"Dawn’s rules meant we weren’t to do any chores. Usually, mum gets us to do some hoovering, tidying up and dishwashing, but Dawn said: ‘No’. That would have been OK, except the television people wanted to film us doing chores - so we ended up doing three times as many!

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"Dawn did a lot of cleaning but she hardly took Fynn out at all. Mum takes her out all the time to the shops. And Dawn didn’t play with me either, but my mum does all the time. She dances with us and we have fun.

"My life has changed a bit since Dawn has left. Now we don’t do as many chores as we used to.

"I cried sometimes when Dawn was here because I missed my mum.

"It was a good experience with another lady in my house, but she didn’t do stuff like my mum did."

FYNN, 2

"There was another lady who came to our house. Her name was Dawn. She said to me ‘dirty, dirty’ all the time. I was really glad to get my mummy home."