What’s it like when your mom is the ‘Golden Bachelorette’?

When Brenden Martin suggested that his mother apply for “The Golden Bachelor,” ABC’s dating show spinoff featuring an older cast, he had wanted to help her expand her dating pool beyond the small city outside Seattle where she lived.

It seemed like a good idea until Martin, 37, found himself struggling to look directly at the TV screen while his mother, Faith Martin, received a near lap dance from a shirtless Chippendales dancer.

“It was just bizarre and awkward to see Mom having some guy 10 years younger than me dancing up on her,” he said.

Martin’s own son, then 8, had been watching, too — but mercifully left the room before his grandmother’s boudoir photo shoot.

As reality dating shows start to look beyond TV’s longtime fixation on twenty- and thirtysomethings to embrace an older generation of singles, a novel experience has emerged: the strangeness of watching a parent date, flirt, kiss and perhaps even fall in love on national television.

Before the “Golden Bachelorette” premiere Wednesday, the show’s first star, Joan Vassos, 61, has four adult children who are preparing themselves to watch their mom woo and be wooed by 24 men. Her son Nick Vassos, 34, is cheering for his mother — up to a point.

“Any of the physical intimacy pieces, I’m not there for,” he said. “I understand human nature, I understand needs, I understand what happens on the show.”

For Martin and other adult children who have found themselves in this position, the experience is more complex than just discomfort. There is also the joy of seeing their parent rekindle their romantic life, the anxiety of seeing them enter the unforgiving world of reality TV fame and the protectiveness that arises when they see their parent get rejected.

Zack Chazin first watched with pride as his mother, Leslie Fhima, won over audiences and the lead of “The Golden Bachelor.” In the season finale, that all came crashing to a halt.

“She gets dumped on TV,” Chazin, 38, said. “I was really upset.”

The breakup came after Chazin and the rest of his family had met the Golden Bachelor, Gerry Turner. Despite feeling confident about his mother’s connection with Turner, Chazin soon found himself helping his mother process a breakup while navigating negative commentary about her online.

In retrospect, he said, “I don’t know if I would want her to have done it.”

There is something about the very phenomenon of adults watching their parents date that has led TV producers to latch on with glee.

In 2022, Max put out a lone season of a dating show called “My Mom, Your Dad,” in which single parents moved into a house to flirt and couple up with one another. (Unknown to them, their college-aged children were watching from a control room, sometimes even pulling the puppet strings of their relationships.) The concept has been more successful in Britain, where the second season of “My Mum, Your Dad” started this week.

Maria Lopiano, a 51-year-old radio presenter who appears on the second season with her 18-year-old daughter, said she was first drawn to the show as a viewer because of how it flipped the common dynamic of a parent disapproving of a child’s choice of a romantic partner. On “My Mum, Your Dad,” it was the child who was aghast at his or her parent’s choices — for example, a mother showing interest in a man her child immediately pegged as a womanizer.

“You knew that if it was the other way, they would be telling their daughter: ‘What are you doing? What do you see in that man?’” Lopiano said in an interview.

When she joined this season’s cast, her daughter, Livia, who was in another room watching a video feed of her mother flirting with potential suitors, was suddenly in the novel position of disapproving of her mother’s choices.

“I think she just doesn’t think before she speaks,” Livia observed in a recent interview. “I think sometimes she just scares the men off.”

The potential for secondhand embarrassment is ratcheted up significantly in the infamous TLC series “MILF Manor,” in which women in their 40s and 50s aren’t merely dating on television — they’re dating men who can be decades younger than them.

On Season 2 of “MILF Manor” — which gained fame in part because of the title’s shock value — Barby Garcia Gutiérrez, 47, a marketing business owner from Salt Lake City, arrived at a house in Canada to date a group of men who were not far in age from her son. The show showed Gutiérrez playing footsie in a hot tub and playing bawdy games.

Before her son, Elijah Bodell, 27, watched the show, he asked friends of his to screen it for him first to see if he could handle it. When he watched the first few episodes, he said, he found himself feeling automatically skeptical about the intentions of the young men who chose to be on the show.

“I know how dudes my age think about a lot of stuff,” he said. “They know they’ve got cameras on them. You never get someone’s authentic self.”

Gutiérrez said that her appearance on the show tested her relationship with her son, who has reservations with reality TV in general, but that the show also gave him a fuller picture of who she is.

“I tell him all the time that just because I’m your mom doesn’t mean I’m not human — I have needs and wants and desires,” she said.

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For Turner’s daughters, there was an outsize adjustment period. Last year, after their father was announced as the first Golden Bachelor, he was suddenly the subject of billboards, thirsty social media posts and the cover of TV Guide, which called him “TV’s sexiest senior.”

“Having all these people like, ‘Oh my god, he’s so hot, his hair is so great,’ I’m like, ‘Cringe,’” Angie Warner, 42, said. “That’s my dad.”

She said she had not been adequately prepared for the negative side of her father’s fame. Many online commenters turned on Turner after the publication of a Hollywood Reporter article that scrutinized his romantic history. The pile-on resumed when Turner announced his divorce from Theresa Nist, the woman he married on the show.

“As a daughter, you innately have that protective nature,” Warner said. “Not all stories are true, not everything that everybody says is true. But you can’t really defend that, so you kind of have to take it and move on.”

Some children of this new kind of reality-show star have helped to turn their parents’ TV fame into an enterprise.

Susan Noles, a charismatic former hairdresser, became a breakout star of the first season of “The Golden Bachelor,” going on to get an agent, start a podcast and land a shopping program on QVC. Last year her daughter, Brittany Noles Law, 39, left her job to become her mother’s social media manager full time, helping to coordinate brand deals, including a recent vaccination campaign with Brooke Shields.

“She has just been living her best life recently,” Noles Law said of her mother. “I’m, like, living through her.”