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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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The only compensation their parents could receive directly would come in the form of reimbursements for e.g. travel expenses, acting classes, music classes etc. Many film studios are understandably reluctant about paying children their acting fees directly, fearing that they might squander their earnings; on the other hand, there have been enough cases of parents financially exploiting their children (and the child consequently ending up empty-handed when they come of age) that I'm not convinced paying a child's fees into a bank account to which their parents have access is a viable solution.

This is an oft-repeated but probably untrue way of describing the motivation of most ambitious parents of child stars. Sure, a lot of them - the Jacksons, the Biebers, whatever - live large off their kids. But that doesn’t mean that drove their ambitions in the first place. If you’ve ever watched the kind of lowbrow reality shows that capture a much earlier stage of the process, stuff like Dance Moms, or shows about boy basketball and football players with ambitious fathers, they often spend huge amounts of money with very little return on their kids, push them beyond reason. In many sports and activities (think a lot of niche sports, or spelling bees, ballet, equestrian stuff, various other competitions) these parents know they’re almost guaranteed never to make a financial return.

“They’re using their kids to get rich” is a bad framework for this. Even if some are gamblers, Vegas odds are better, and most are smart enough to know it. I think the actual motivation is often either living through their children, a chance at another life, with better choices, and a strong whip hand ‘directing’ the child to strive for greatness, or it’s a form of competition with other parents. Adulthood offers fewer avenues for the kind of simple victory that a competition in youth does. You can play in an over-40s league in tennis or whatever, but that’s going to be full of ex-semi-pros who’ve been playing since they were 4. You can try to get rich - the primary marker of status in adult American life - but that’s both difficult and, for almost everyone, an interminably slow process. You can can try to get hot, but that’s hard and gets harder as time goes on. Or you can make something of your kid, and reap the rewards in smugness.

I think if you ask the average parent of a child actor “if you could live your whole life over again, would you do it?”, every single one would say yes (even caveated so you can’t become a bitcoin nvidia trillionaire president astronaut). Whereas in the general population many people would still say yes, but not 100%.

This status-and-love-seeking behavior from full grown adults seems increasingly cringe to me the older I get. I can't help but imagine it's downstream of feeling unloved by the parent as a child and they are desperate to seek love from the world instead. This hit me so hard a few years ago when I met up with a few friends while I was in another country and they insisted that everywhere we eat was statusmaxxing or whatever, the type of place you could brag about going, even to the extent that they wanted to walk out of a place run by a sweet old man when they deemed the food subpar. This stems from insecurity and once you grow out of it it's horrible to see in other people. The full grown adult who wants a golden child actor or a star is doing something so horrible and so tacky and I really doubt most of them are happy at the end of it. Britney's parents raised a global superstar and they probably spend every night wishing she was bringing in more money instead of dancing half naked on instagram. I don't sympathize with the parents.

Yeah, the stage mother has long been a stock figure. If you look at the career of Gypsy Rose Lee, for example, who wants to put their daughter on stage as a stripper? Even a high-class one? Well, a mom who had stars in her eyes about a theatre career, couldn't make it on her own, and is living vicariously through her kids, for one, as well as using them to support the family financially:

Their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, forged various birth certificates for each of her daughters—older when needed to evade varying state child labor laws, and younger for reduced or free train fares. The girls were unsure until later in life what their years of birth were.

I'm not necessarily saying that parents push their children into acting with the expectation that the child will make it big, and they (the parents) will personally profit. The odds of a given child actor making it big are only somewhat better than those for a given adult actor. But there do seem to be a number of cases in which a child actor's career unexpectedly took off and their parents immediately began spending money which rightfully belonged to the child, not the parents, sometimes to the point that the child was left without a penny when they came of age (e.g. Gary Coleman successfully sued his parents for misappropriating his assets). This strikes me as obviously unfair, and should not be allowed to happen.

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