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I feel sorry for your kid(s), the upside is that they'll never talk to you again once they realize you're toxic.
Ok, you can go back to Twitter now.
I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
341–350 of 367 posts
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, maybe watch something original and not totally derived from something else, like the Marvel movies, or Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or Fantastic Beasts...
pretty hard when about 80% of new films these days are a sequel, remake, or tie into an existing universe[1]. Yes, just watch old films you say, but they're not on the front page of netflix and disney+, where the average person goes for entertainment recommendations. [1] https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-has-b...
That was rather the point I was making...
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it that they weren’t pushed to do sports, or is it that they were never given the opportunity to try it? IMO, my role as a parent is to expose my kids to as many things as I can. If the like it, I give them more, if they don’t, then we move on to something else.
> Is it that they weren’t pushed to do sports, or is it that they were never given the opportunity to try it? I think ultimately the problem is that the child has the first-hand knowledge of their own experience, but not the mature perspective of age; and the adult has the mature perspective of age, but not the first-hand knowledge of the child's experience. I have a toddler. Sometimes he knows he's tired needs to sl…
I agree, and I don't mean to imply that the very first mention of "I want to quit" is the right time to quit. But, as a parent, it isn't difficult to have a sense of where they fall on that spectrum. And yeah, you won't be 100% right, but such is life.
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
People don't want to believe. I try to explain to my friends why I won't watch anything with children as prominent characters, but they generally don't want to hear it, because "Stranger Things is so good" or something. Hollywood is the land of depravity and abuse. It's no place for children.
Is it so bad though? Our world has shown capability - still - for improving living conditions. Optimism would say that the child actors of today have a better and fairer shot at a good life than they had 50 (for example) years ago. Now Harry Potter is pretty old already, and outside Hollywood, but those seemed to fare pretty well.
These children will never have a chance at a normal life. They have careers, certainly, but they'll never know what it's like to date or even shop for groceries without their celebrity status warping it somehow. Every single facet of their lives is public, forever.
Adults choose this life willingly. Kids have this life chosen for them, or at the very least they're too young to truly understand what they are consenting to.
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Helping others gives meaning to life. It's a way of leaving a legacy.
People don't have to be famous actors to see meaning in their lives. He does not think the experience was good for him. Unlike his character, Will Wheaton is real person. Also, his character was hardly the "role model for millions of young men" one. It was not written that way and afaik Wesley was not treated that way by fans.
>Also, his character was hardly the "role model for millions of young men" one. It was not written that way and afaik Wesley was not treated that way by fans.
Correct. I doubt fefe23 has ever seen TNG, because Wesley was in no way, shape, or form a desirable role model for anyone.
(My understanding is that Wesley was sort of a self insert for Star Trek creator, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry. As with all of the other times Roddenberry tried to artificially impose his own Message(TM) on the show, it failed miserably.)
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#346Now think how many children suffered the same fate, but we’ll never hear about it because they did not become famous. Reminds me of “dance moms” or “cheer moms”, “football dads”, etc. If you’re a parent, remember not to live your unfulfilled dreams through your children.
When I was 8; I worked with a crew installing mobile homes. I was especially valued for the double wides; I was light enough to work the roofline without denting the roof. At 11 I was operating construction machinery, I had to hide from the inspectors on some jobs but on others I could talk to them. State vs. Federal I think: the State guys could be bribed. At 16 software I had written (bid estimation) was selling fo…
Thanks for sharing, that was a hard read. It sounds like sociopath behaviour to me.
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Music is a very "asian" or "chinese" thing to put your child through. Asian culture simply adopted American and English culture in this regard. In the United States circa 1950s and 1960s it was very common for children to be taking piano lessons, and owning a piano was also relatively common. Both the lessons and the piano itself were important status symbols, and having both were considered markers of being middle…
I’m not sure if your statement about Asian adopting this idea from the west is right, but in ancient times a Chinese scholar has to excel at 琴棋書畫, where the first is a musical instrument. As someone who spent years self learning piano without having a piano to convince my mother to have a piano, I envy anyone why are forced to learn such thing. I have a younger cousin who in his childhood I encouraged her mother to l…
There's nothing new in any civilization about the upper classes studying and venerating art and music. What was new was the emergence of large middle classes and a very rapid, peculiarly pervasive adoption of the piano in particular. It may have started in Continental Europe, but as far as I can tell it was through Victorian England that it spread across the globe--directly through the British Empire, but also indirectly through the U.S. and then, especially in Asia, Japan.
We're not talking electronic keyboards, but a large and expensive musical instrument which might cost as much as all the other furnishings in a house combined. It was usually upright pianos, which were cheaper and could sit against a wall, but still a major purchase. Today you're much more likely to find electronic keyboards in homes, which even at the higher end are still a much smaller purchase for middle-class incomes, yet you probably[citation needed] would not find them in nearly as many homes as pianos in their heyday. Pianos are extremely functional instruments and in many respects ideal for learning music, but that alone doesn't even begin to explain their popularity, nor the popularity of piano music lessons.
Different countries had their own local dynamics. The Mandarin system built up a type of middle class culture (even if the middle class itself was never very big) throughout much of East and SE Asia, making formal study of classic art and literature a virtue for non-elites, including the poor, whether or not a family could actually afford an education. Japan never adopted the Mandarin system (class hierarchy too deep and rigid), but the Meiji Restoration accomplished much the same in making virtues of the Japanese intelligentsia part of a new middle class culture. So these cultures in particular were already primed for the piano-as-modern-middle-class-status-symbol wave when industrialization exploded their middle classes. And perhaps this is why the violin and classical Western music in general also saw relatively strong adoption--because classical music was already held in esteem by the masses, and much of that esteem simply shifted to Western classical music. (By contrast, in American and some European cultures much more emphasis seems to have been placed on women learning the piano. And dynamics such as the Protestant work ethic tend to moderate mass adoption of elite norms which aren't immediately practical or beneficial.)
In any event, my point was just that this experience wrt piano lessons which are strongly encouraged and even demanded by parents has been shared (indistinguishably so, and for nearly indistinguishable reasons) by many millions of families all across the world, including in the U.S., where it approached something approximating a universal experience among the middle-class--actually taking lessons, or at least understanding that it was something you were supposed to be doing. It's just that most of those experiences outside Asia and the Asian diaspora occurred in earlier generations. The differences lay in how and when different communities arrived at that cross-cultural nexus, and how they moved away from it, if they did at all.
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my parents failed to recognize that for 10 years (as evidenced by never presenting the option of finding someone else) Well, in this case tho, did you ever suggest it? I mean, if it was a matter of disliking the material or the teaching style, but otherwise those lessons weren't in bad form, abusive, etc., so they couldn't see anything bad about them, how would they know?
(Not OP) I think it's pretty common for kids to not realise something's a problem, or to not realise there are other possibilities. Something happened to me as a kid that had a significant negative effect on my life, but I only understood that decades later, and no one else was aware of the problem at the time.
What happened to you as a kid? It's always interesting to learn about childhood traumas like this so that as a parent I can recognize the signs.
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the answer is to let them try different things. There's going to be something that they like better than the others. If they keep begging you to stop making them do a thing, that's a clue that it's not the right one.
I think I'd like to say to my son when he gets older, "You have to have at least one skill you're actively developing that takes several years to master. It can be piano or chess or language or baseball or StarCraft or juggling, but it has to be something that takes time to master, and you have to spend at least a few hours every week in deliberate practice." I also plan on modeling that behavior by having skills I c…
Framing this a requirement with specific criteria that must be met feels a bit strange to me. I'm assuming you get into more of the nuance as to why you are telling him that he must do these things...
Re: I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it so bad though? Our world has shown capability - still - for improving living conditions. Optimism would say that the child actors of today have a better and fairer shot at a good life than they had 50 (for example) years ago. Now Harry Potter is pretty old already, and outside Hollywood, but those seemed to fare pretty well.
These children will never have a chance at a normal life. They have careers, certainly, but they'll never know what it's like to date or even shop for groceries without their celebrity status warping it somehow. Every single facet of their lives is public, forever. Adults choose this life willingly. Kids have this life chosen for them, or at the very least they're too young to truly understand what they are consentin…
Counterpoint: Brook Shields