graphic by kayleigh woltal
In 1957, a famous burlesque/striptease performer by the name of Gypsy Rose Lee (born Louise Hovick) released her bombshell memoir “Gypsy,” detailing her childhood as a child performer of vaudeville. This story of child stardom went some kind of viral, resulting in its adaptation into a hit musical of the same name. That musical became a movie and spawned many other adaptations and revivals. The presentation it gives of being a child in show business isn’t flattering: the memoir details serious identity issues, an emotionally abusive and overbearing mother and patterns of exploitations.
About 65 years later, Jeannette McCurdy published a memoir of her own called “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” in which she details the many issues and traumas that arose from the experience of being a child star. Many elements of these stories are eerily similar, despite the many decades of separation. Just like Hovick, McCurdy was placed into an industry of fame at a very young age by an abusive mother and was failed by an industry and an audience that continued enabling her abuse.
These are just two stories out of many. Pop culture is flooded with the testimonies of former child stars who experienced abuse and trauma over the course of their parents’ quests to put their child onstage or on screen. Many of these young stars went on to crash and burn in their own ways, sometimes in extremely publicized tabloid breakdowns.
The doomed status of young celebrities has become ubiquitous, turning into a pop culture truism of its own. It’s so well known that the celebrities who survive it without getting addicted to anything, harmed or arrested — like Shirley Temple or the more modern Hillary Duff — are lauded for being “seemingly well adjusted” and escaping the curse.
After more than 65 years of the American people being reminded time and time again of the dangers of making children famous, this begs the question: why do we still have child stars? Is it their potential? The way that they present a canvas onto which we can project all of our anxieties and hopes about the American youth? Is it just because child stars offer a novel approach to what we find attractive about celebrities as a whole? We know the consequences, and have known for decades, but it seems that we have trouble imagining a celebrity media landscape without it.
When it comes to the question of why we still have famous children, there’s an immediate practical answer. Child stars are most commonly child actors, who do serve a solid, and quite obvious, niche for the film industry: playing children. Without them, there’d be a serious crisis in any story told about children, which happens to be one of the cores of kids entertainment. It feels impossible to halt any and every story that features someone below a certain age or to insist that adult actors take their place.
Some important legal protections exist for the child actor, like the child labor laws that are meant to keep performing children from working grueling hours. Many of these are meant to mitigate the risk of child stardom, but even with these regulations in place there are various workarounds. For example, to allow for more working time, twins became a much more valuable asset to casting directors, who could cast two children in the same role and essentially double viable filming hours. This produced child stars who came in pairs, like the Olsen or the Sprouse twins. While these labor laws helped many, it didn’t protect the Olsen twins from becoming media obsessions who were in the uniquely gross situation of having online countdowns to their eighteenth birthdays.
One major distinction here, however, is the line between a child actor and a child star. Plenty of young people perform on stage or on screen without incident, but things become much more complicated when a child is given any sense of stardom or notoriety. Labor laws helped the child actors, but it’s much harder to find solutions for child stars. After all, how do you control something as nebulous and nuanced as fame? If anything feels more impossible than banning all minors from movie sets until the end of time, it’s controlling fame.
Fame is a chaotic force, and is hard enough to predict, let alone control. The en masse capability of the American public to give someone attention is not a force that has been refined.
What’s worse is that in the past few years, it’s only gotten more powerful. Social media has made the access to this kind of celebrity even easier, where parents are able to use their vlogs and posts of their children to get attention (both social and monetary) without having to face the rejection of a producer or a casting agent.
Anyone can now create a public persona, and many parents are utilizing their audiences and their children to unwittingly produce a whole new class of child stars — one that’s infinitely more difficult to regulate and control than ever before.
When it comes to regulation, it’s unclear if we can ever present a full solution to the problem. Famous children appear to be ingrained into the fabric of American celebrity; to provide a complete fix to child stars, we may need a radical overhaul of how we approach fame. Until then, however, there are things we can do to slow the process down.
Much like the labor laws that exist on sets today, we can examine some regulatory measures to slow down the process of celebrity-making while promoting the privacy of minors. Limits could be placed on brand deals and sponsorships, for one, which provide a significant amount of the economic reason for child celebrities. There are also possible fixes that could involve studio policies about how much information they release on their child actors, and how much press they do. On a possibly more radical track, there could be rules where minors must perform under stage names or with a certain level of anonymity.
There are a million possible solutions, ranging in viability and scale. But what is clear, at this stage in our discourse, is that we need to start talking about solutions. We know that child stars are a problem: they were a problem when Judy Garland was put through the system, and they were a problem when Jeannette McCurdy’s memoir shed light on the current state of it. They’re especially a problem on social media, where no child labor laws are governing social media personalities like the D’Amelios, who are being launched into the same system before our very eyes.
The crisis of child celebrity is more important now than ever, and it’s time for a cultural wake-up call. We’ve learned our lesson about child stars. We’ve learned it many, many times. Now, we just need to do something about it.