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25 sats \ 6 replies \ @Aardvark OP 8 Mar \ parent \ on: Should children be allowed to be actors? AskSN
I'm not positive it's ever perfectly fine. In order to be in a show, you can't be a child actor, you have to be the best child actor.
Even the ones that aren't subjected to abuse at the hands of horrible people in Hollywood, don't traditionally have good lives.
Obviously you can legislate horrible parenting, but there's really not many great examples of child actors having fantastic lives.
By the same token doing drugs (and all manner of other vices), tend to worsen people's lives.
I'd be surprised if the effect were as pronounced as you suggest. There are thousands of child actors, but we're only likely to hear about the cases that go disastrously wrong.
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When you're doing drugs, you don't have to be the best drug user to enjoy drugs.
Generally speaking, the children who are able to become child actors have spent their childhoods in acting, classes, dancing classes, music, etc etc etc.
There's thousands of them competing for a very small amount of jobs, and the ones that succeed (generally speaking) have parents that are borderline abusive.
Once again, I don't think that you can legislate parenting, but there's a reason so many child actors go off the rails. For every one that goes apeshit insane, there's several more that are just quietly fucked up.
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I'll grant all of that.
My point is that there's nothing inherent in acting that is abusive. That means acting is the wrong thing to ban or restrict. The problem is arising from somewhere else in the system.
I've never thought this issue through, but I could imagine some solutions that basically drive up the cost of malfeasance. Perhaps all income should have to go into a trust that the kid gets when they reach adulthood (limiting perverse incentives of parents) and producers have to put up a huge bond to cover potential damages of abuse, should they be revealed. That latter point is sometimes used for big industrial projects, in case they end up ruining a bunch of shit around them.
The result would likely be similar to just banning it.
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Unfortunately, the parents often do it because they are living through their children, and not necessarily for monetary gain.
I do agree, there's nothing inherently wrong with acting, it's just one if those odd problems that doesn't have an easy answer.
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I'd be curious to know if other countries have the same problems. I know there are child actors in other countries.
Maybe the threat of public canings, for instance, is enough of a deterrence.
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That's a good question. I think that Canada has had similar issues, but beyond that, I have no idea.