America’s Most Extensive Home Videos

It’s 7 a.m. on a hectic weekday morning. Someone has to get three preschool age kids ready to see the dentist. Then there’s breakfast, getting to work on time ... and, hey, the doorbell’s ringing.

Surprise! It’s a film crew.

It may sound like a media-age nightmare, but Felton and Anita Gholston of White Plains, N.Y., actually volunteered to live portions of their everyday lives in front of “Childhood’s” documentary cameras. The filming, which began in the fall of 1989, encompassed such events as Christmas, the first day of school for Benjamin, then 5, and the first stabs at language by 1-year-old Avery.

What was it like sharing the house with a bunch of strangers bearing lenses?

“Once we got past the initial days of filming, we kind of got used to having them about,” said Felton Gholston, a technician for Xerox. “On the whole, it was really kind of fun.”

Not every family might feel this way, but not every family was right for “Childhood,” either. The series’ producers had specific ideas of what they wanted, said Erna Akuginow, one of the show’s three producers/directors/writers.

“We wanted an American family that had at least three kids ranging from 5 to 12, but not all boys or all girls, and we didn’t want a family that was super wealthy or super poor. Then we wanted a family not in a city but close to a city,” she said. “It really was like casting (a role).”

The producers found hundreds of possible families through meetings with pediatricians and social service agencies, narrowing the list down quickly, Akuginow said.

“We said there was no pay involved, so they knew up front. We said, ‘You’ll see us on your doorstep over the course of at least the next year.’ Not everybody is comfortable with that.”

The Gholstons decided to give it a shot “because we thought it would give a positive view of an intact black family,” said Felton Gholston. “There are a lot of positive things that will come out of the series--that different cultures and races have basically the same values when it comes to raising their kids.”

The idea of having the ultimate home video didn’t hurt, either. “The other thing we thought is that we could do this for posterity,” he added. “We thought, if we do this, we can look back 50 years from now and say ‘we were on TV once’ and look at the family all together.”