Brian Van Pelt/KTVB

Crews for Baby Borrowers wrap up production after shooting in an Eagle neighborhood in August.

KTVB.COM first broke this story in September. NBC has now set an air-date for the series.

BOISE - A new reality show taped in Idaho over the summer has a controversial record.

See the show's trailer

Baby Borrowers is set to debut on NBC at 7 p.m. on February 18th, after shooting in Eagle in August.  The show gives teen couples their own house, and heaps on responsibility by giving them real children to take care of.

Love Productions is preparing the American version of the program, after a successful run in England on BBC3 earlier this year.  The teen couples are given a toddler, pre-teen, teenager and elderly person for three days each.

"We take five teenage couples who are dating but have never lived together… and we give them their own houses and their own responsibilities,” Baby Borrowers producer Tom Shelly said. “We give them their own jobs and we give them other people's children to take care of. So they experience adulthood and parenthood in fast forward."

The company ran advertisements in local publications and on KTVB.COM looking for local children to be “borrowed.”  The ad said the show aimed to “help the teenagers involved make more informed decisions about their own future as well as educating a teen audience about the true reality of parenting.”

"A lot of the people, the parents who loaned their children to these teenagers are from the Boise area," Shelly said.

The BBC version created a stir, prompting the city council in Norwhich, England where the show was taped to ask for production to be stopped.

"We were so worried about it that we asked the BBC to cancel the series, but they refused," Norwhich council spokesman Mark Langlands told the UK Guardian in January.

"It's pretty scary. Who are the parents who are going to give up their kids?" Geoffry White a licensed psychologist told ABCNews.com. "There better be very careful screening and profiling of the parents and kids so these infants and children don't get traumatized. Serious emotional damage can happen very quickly."

Unrelated CBS reality series Kid Nation raised concern this fall from a wide variety of public officials and children’s rights advocates.  The show took forty children and transplanted them to a rustic old west movie set in the middle of the New Mexico desert.  The show barred any contact between parents and children during the show’s taping.

In the case of Baby Borrowers, parents of all the minor children involved were allowed to watch everything that went on from a nearby home via closed-circuit TV.  The parents could remove their children at any time.

"It's all a very safe environment, we have the actual parents who are loaning their kids monitoring from another house, and we have professional nannies that are in the houses at all times,” Shelly said. “It's all monitored by us with a medic on hand, so everything is safe. It's safer than leaving your two year old in the room right next to you with no one watching them."

Idaho, like New Mexico, has a set of lenient child labor laws that provide an exemption for entertainment programs.  After Kid Nation was filmed, legislators in New Mexico clamped down on the exemption.

Idaho labor officials say this state’s laws are archaic – leaving enforcement to school boards and truant officers.

“Because our labor laws haven’t been updated since 1911, we basically rely on the Feds,” Craig Soelberg with the Idaho Department of Labor said.  “There is an exemption in Federal law for things like (entertainment programs), that’s why they get away with it in states that don’t have child labor laws.”

Soelberg said a set of recommendations have been turned over to the governor’s office.

Labor spokesperson Bob Fick said the state could look at tightening statues. He said the issue comes up from time to time, and the latest discussion isn’t directly related to the Baby Borrowers taping.

“There’s a proposal under consideration now that would have the state take over enforcement, but nothing’s been decided,” he said.

Peg Owens with the Idaho Department of Commerce’s Idaho Film Bureau notes that Baby Borrowers taped their series when school was out for the summer.

“We’ve not really seen anyone misusing our child labor laws,” she said. “You have to adhere to the laws that are on the books; however my feeling is that this is between the parents, the production company and the school if school is in session. Working on a set can be an incredibly rare learning opportunity, as long as the parents and production company work with the school when school is in session.”

A spokesperson for Love Productions told TV Week magazine that labors laws were a factor, but Shelly said the producers picked the Eagle neighborhood as much for its qualities as an ideal location.

"We picked this area to film because we found the perfect setup for what we were looking for. We found this beautiful cul du sac that has five houses all in a row where we could put the five teenagers all in a row, and it just kind of symbolized an all American town, which is what we were looking for,” he said.

Six episodes will be made from the footage shot in the Boise-area.  An air-date has not yet been set, but producers have been told to be ready by mid-October.

"I think it's going to be a very different kind of reality show. It's not anything like you've seen on TV before," Shelly said.