Ascribed Celebrity and Child Stardom Conflicts via Percy Hynes White
Percy Hynes White is a young Canadian actor who has been working in film and TV, predominately in Canada, since he was about age two (Ahsan, 2023). He is the son of writer, actor and director Joel Thomas Hynes and screenwriter, television producer, director, and actress, Sherry White, both of whom are well established in the Canadian media industry (Ahsan, 2023). Sherry White’s script for the film “Maudie” won the 2016 Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay. She wrote and directed for “Orphan Black” among numerous other works (Wikipedia contributors, 2023). Joel Thomas Hynes’ debut novel, entitled “Down to the Dirt,” won the Percy Janes First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the Atlantic Book Award and the Winterset Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary and the ReLit Awards. In the book’s movie adaptation, Joel played the lead, which he also did in the adaptation of his novel, “Say Nothing Saw Wood.” The movie was renamed as “Cast No Shadow,” and Hynes was awarded the 2014 Michael Weir Award for Best Atlantic Screenwriter at the Atlantic Film Festival and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (Wikipedia contributors, 2024).
By age 9, Percy Hynes White had the leading role in “Winners” and was in several short films and shows. At 13, he won the Best Actor award from the 2014 Atlantic Film Festival and the Rising Star Award at the 2014 Edmonton International Film Festival for his performance in "Cast No Shadow", the same movie where he played across from his father. In 2022, Percy also received a Best Supporting Actor Award from The Vancouver Film Critics Circle for his performance as a supporting lead in "I Like Movies”. He is currently best known for his roles in “The Gifted”, “Pretty Hard Cases” and “Wednesday” (IMBD, n.d.).
Hynes White generally comes across as a very normal and relatable person in interviews and seems gracious and supportive when speaking about current and past coworkers, giving him a fairly neutral position upon first glance. In an interview with CBC after the massive success of the television series “Wednesday,” his parents were reported as saying “[They say] all the attention hasn't changed their son. Growing up around the industry, he knows the business can be filled with ups and downs and fame can be fleeting” (St. John’s Morning Show, 2022).
In an interview with ICON magazine, Hynes White spoke to how, while he had little choice in starting his career as an actor, he cannot think of what he could do that would be somehow radically different, that he had always wanted to do something artistic. He also spoke about his then-current interest in ‘70s and ‘80s horror films and VHS collecting. When he spoke about his life, Hynes White pointed out that he was always surrounded by people who were part of the film and television industries and how little it surprised him to have gone into this work given that fact (Bernocchi, 2023), a valid point to make when thinking about the topic of “nepo babies.” Generally however, Hynes White keeps a fairly low profile and has selectively posted on Instagram in recent years.
In this paper I will be focusing on concepts around achieved vs. ascribed celebrity, authenticity as a concept and the celebrity persona, all largely via the frame of child stars, using Percy Hynes White as the vehicle for exploration and comparison.
Studying The Text
When trying to categorize the kinds of celebrity people generally use distinctions made by Rojek (2001), which he breaks down into achieved, ascribed, attributed and celetoid. For the purpose of this paper, we are only interested in celebrity that is either achieved and/or ascribed. Ascribed celebrity is fame that comes with a person’s relationships, for example, a member of a royal house or the child of a celebrity. This celebrity comes from the person’s biological descent and while it can be affected positively or negatively by their own actions, it is that preexisting family relationship that acts as the basis for their celebrity. This form of fame was a major factor historically in the social power of royalty, allowing them immediate respect and impact (Rojek, 2001). With events like the American and French Revolutions, the foundations of ascribed celebrity came under attack. The celebrities of that era were predominately of the aristocracy and, with the shift to democracy, that association transformed ascribed fame from a positive attribute into a negative one (Rojek, 2001).
Over the next 200 years, as democracy and commodification spread and evolved, the average person took more of their cultural, aesthetic and social cues from the pages of newspapers and magazines than they took from the upper classes. Proprietors of these publications focused on finding (and often creating) exciting stories and new figures to raise up and then write about frequently, maintaining reader engagement and leading to the beginnings of the para-social culture we have today (Gamson, 1992; Rojek, 2001).
Meanwhile, ascribed celebrity found itself surpassed by celebrity that was achieved. Achieved celebrity is fame gained via merit or accomplishment; examples are an acclaimed actor or athlete. While this had always been a well-respected path to gain celebrity, it was only with the attack on ascribed celebrity and the adoption of ideologies such as meritocracy that emerged with the political shift to democracy that achieved celebrity emerged (Rojek, 2001). The enduring values of meritocracy and a healthy skepticism towards those claiming ascribed fame or familial connection manifest today when people praise a talented actor who comes from nothing even as they mock the talentless wannabe who survives by flaunting their famous relative (Jones, 2022; Rojek, 2001).
Also involved in this larger discussion of authenticity is the ideas of the Celebrity Self/Persona and its multilayered nature, which are discussed by Dyer (1986), Holmes (2005), Tolson (2001), Van den Bulck (2014) and many others. Considering the Celebrity Persona and its parts in the context of authenticity, first comes the Public Persona, the “official” version of who we see on the big screen or at the award show. Then, the Private Persona follows, a more intimate but equally manufactured version of the celebrity, the one that has causes and releases approved photos of important events like weddings to be published in magazines. This version of the celebrity hypothetically bridges the distance between the “public” and the “real” celebrity. Finally, there is the “real,” the “elusive,” the “true” identity of the celebrity that tabloids try to unmask with invasive candid photos and carefully documented lows.
Dyer argued that “stars articulate what it is to be human in society: that is, they express the particular notion that we hold of the ‘individual’” (1986, 8). Supporting the notion of individualism upon which capitalist society depends, Dyer suggested that the continual attempt to negotiate “authenticity” in the star image, i.e., the perpetual attempt to lay claim to the ‘real” self - was organized around a desire to suggest a “separable, coherent quality, located ‘inside’ consciousness and variously termed “the self,” “the soul,” “,the subject”...” (Dyer, 1986, p.9 as quoted in Holmes, 2005, p.27).
All these layers to celebrity identity described by Dyer (1986) factor into the discussion of authenticity. Whether or not celebrities have what people perceive as authenticity is important to many audiences (Van den Bulck, 2014). There is an innate curiosity to know the authentic person behind the celebrity status, a desire that goes back to the start in the 1800s of the celebrity phenomena as we know it. This desire has acted as a foundational element of the celebrity studies field as it has developed (Gamson, 1992).
There are also added motivating factors that affect the children of celebrities that are considered significantly less often than their close connections in the Entertainment industry. It is no surprise that a child might go into the same field as a parent. For centuries, the expectation was that children worked in their parents’ occupation as they took on the family occupation. In the modern era, the Entertainment industry seems to be one of the few places where this sort of guild or lineage-based passing down of the family business continues.
As an audience hunts for authenticity in celebrity parents and others who profit off the entertainment industry, there is often a desire to violate the privacy of their children’s to gain an invasive, unsanctioned peek of what the star is really like as a parent, often gained by stalking the celebrity family for photos. Jorge and Marôpo (2017) write about this and the ways celebrity parents try to cope. In their research, they identify roughly three ways the privacy of celebrity children is handled.
Jorge and Marôpo (2017) label these coping approaches as exhibiting, protecting and balanced modes of representation. By the exhibiting mode, Jorge and Marôpo (2017) mean growing up in the limelight and directly connected to their famous parents’ private lives and image; an example of this is Suri Cruise, daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. The protecting mode of visibility is characterized by celebrity attempts to hide their children from public scrutiny or otherwise protect their privacy. This includes distorting or blocking the child’s face in photographs or filing lawsuits to limit the ability of paparazzi to stalk their children. Examples of this include the British singer Adele’s lawsuit to block paparazzi who intruded into her two-year old son’s playgroup and took photos later released worldwide, and pop star Paul Weller and his wife Hannah’s public fight to protect children after pictures of their own A balanced modality combines the presence of children as participants in the celebrity’s public and professional life while reserving aspects of their privacy, an arrangement that Kim Kardashian has strived to achieve regarding her four children. (Jorge and Marôpo, 2017)
Ascribed celebrities, wrapped up in the generally unfavorable impression of nepotism, face a relentless and perhaps inescapable public urge to invade their personal privacy, especially when they are or have been child actors. It is clear that ascribed celebrities are denied privacy rights that we commonly extend to less famous children. How parents, families, states and countries handle the issue of child actor privacy invasion speaks volumes about media culture. Turning to the concept of ascribed fame as a “new aristocracy,” Jones (2023) in his article talks about the concept of “nepo baby spectrums.” One Jones “spectrum” tracks the clout Maya Hawke gains because she is the daughter of movie stars Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawk versus someone who parent is a writer. The other Jones spectrum tracks how much we like the ascribed celebrity. The more “old money” a celebrity is, the more inherited wealth and fame they have, the more we like them. We like the “nouveau riche” less. Compare Carrie Fisher with Lily-Rose Depp.
Fisher was the daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, who divorced when she was two years old. Fisher went on to marry Elizabeth Taylor, and later Connie Stevens, nesting Carrie amidst an extraordinary list of world class actors. Her film career began in 1975. Her second role was Princess Leia in the original Star Wars movie, who she also played in her last film. Subsequent roles included The Blues Brothers, Hanna and her Sisters, When Harry Met Sally, and Postcards from the Edge (which was based on her novel) (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025). One can reasonably ask whether Carrie Fisher would have had access to the roles and opportunities that became her enormous body of work had she not been a debutante of Hollywood royalty? Lily-Rose Depp is the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis and has faced skepticism about her acting skills because she has been perceived to be working only thanks to nepotism. In a 2025 Daily Mail article, in response to this criticism and in her defense, Depp observed that the internet cares a lot more about who an actor’s family is than do the people who cast actors into roles. She stressed that even if an actor gets their foot in the door, that’s all they have. There’s “a lot of work that comes after that.”
The already suspect authenticity of the celebrity is brought even further into question by ascribed celebrity and is intrinsic in the discussion of a child star. When that child is also the child of a celebrity, their privacy and identity fall under extreme question. As a result of their celebrity parent’s career and the media attention that their parent receives, the child already lives an inherently abnormal life and must adjust to unique external pressures, usually either aggressively avoiding media or allowing themselves to be put on display. Combined with the possibility that such children also work in the Entertainment industry, the authenticity of their own celebrity and talent become open to question.
The child is shaped by these non-normal circumstances and likely becomes involved in acting because of the demands or proximity of the parent. How much a child can consent with full understanding of the repercussions to celebrity status at such a young age is questionable. If the public consensus is that the person on screen or in photoshoots is not authentic but has been on sets and stages since childhood, what does that mean for their alleged celebrity? How do the audience and tabloids scrape away the easy filmography and inherited legacy to find who the child actor has become on their own?
There is an existing body of research on the nature of the child star in celebrity studies, but there is a noticeable lack of research in fields like developmental psychology (Hilke, 2016; Anderson, 2011). While the Screen Actors Guild and ACTRA regulate how much time a child can spend on set and how much time must be put towards schooling and California Child Actor's Bill (also known as the Coogan Act) protect a child’s earnings and long term prospects, these legal measures only cover those children who are inside their bounds such as guild members and do not take into account the child actor’s emotional wellbeing (Anderson, 2011; Masterson, 2021). While not every child actor will have the kinds of troubled experiences as Drew Barrymore or Jennette McCurdy, children can still be put into scenes and social settings that have lasting impacts.
Former child actor Paul Petersen, who formed an advocacy group for child actors called A Minor Consideration in 1990 after the suicide of Rusty Hamer. On A Minor Consideration’s website, Peterson recounted a scene in which he appeared that has haunted him into adulthood. He remembers it “not as an actor’s moment, but as a 10-year-old boy witnessing his father’s death by hanging with all the internal drama” (Anderson, 2011). In that moment, he felt all the emotions a child would feel upon finding his dead father including abandonment and fear for his mother. Even after 50 years, Peterson is still deeply affected by that memory, observing that “[I]n order to convince an audience to suspend disbelief you must, internally, believe utterly in the character and event you are portraying. That’s the gift . . . and the curse” (Anderson, 2011).
Studies about the emotional and psychological effects of being engaged as a child in the world of drama are few and somewhat mixed. If one looks at children who have only done a few school plays or similar creative productions, it can have a very positive effect on a child’s sense of self. But when one looks at children who participate in a more formal setting like a drama program offered by an arts magnet school, they measure themselves in terms of friendship, self-concept of physical appearance and physical abilities, and general self-concept (Anderson, 2011). Development literature has a wealth of accounts about how extraordinary demands on developing children and young adults can lead to psychopathology (Hilke, 2016). The complex, high pressure and unique situations that child actors are put in can lead to such long term issues as “maladaptive characterological and interpersonal constructs like a “false self” and to various maladaptive ego maneuvers and defenses” (Hilke, 2016). Children need a certain level of stability and consistent interpersonal relationships to develop healthily, elements which a career as a child actor can inherently lack. When one takes these factors into account the lack of academic research on the wellbeing of child actors noted by Jane O’Connor and Anderson (2011) is deeply concerning.
The Percy of It All
Compared to many other celebrities, Hynes White is not well known. He is a familiar face in Canada and the film festival scene but until the television series “Wednesday”, he wasn’t widely known. In the above-mentioned interview, his mother said that before “Wednesday”, Percy had about 76,000 followers and after “Wednesday” aired, he had 2.5 million (St. John’s Morning Show, 2022). At the time of this writing, he currently has 2.6 million Instagram followers. Like many actors, he has been successful in that he has a consistent career and work. However, he has remained in the limbo of being fairly well known to a small audience and totally unknow to the general public. Only after the explosive popularity of “Wednesday” did Hynes White became a topic of celebrity discussion, along with most of his fellow cast members, The sole exception might have been his co-star Jenna Ortega, who had played a major role in “Scream 5” in 2020 and was already well known.
Suddenly, his private life was of interest to millions, something of which he became aware as it happened. Hynes White said in one CBC interview that all the sudden attention was “a little weird” (Ahsan, 2023). He said he was trying not to think too much about his “Wednesday” role and believed there hadn't been a difference in his real-world life, something he felt was all that mattered. He reported that he was on his phone less since there was so much online attention directed at him (Ahsan, 2023). The sudden change in his life was unsurprising, according to Hynes White, considering the amount of scrutiny that was being directed towards Ortega’s and his private lives in the aftermath of “Wednesday’s” worldwide success.
While he was well received for his work on the show, it was his proximity to Jenna Ortega that brought him intensely into the spotlight. Ortega and White have talked about their friendship in multiple interviews in the lead up and the year since the show was released. People avidly followed as Ortega, Hynes White and their other co-star and good friend, Georgie Farmer, went to fashion shows and travelled in late 2022 and early 2023. Many began to excitedly gossip about whether or not he and Ortega were dating and hunted for clues about their possible relationship. Celebrity gossip Instagram account “DeuxMoi” fed rumors that the two were dating, claiming they were romantically involved while filming (Tuzla, 2024). This was only heightened when it was revealed Ortega picked White as her co-star for a 2024 romantic drama, “Winter Spring Summer or Fall,” in which she was the female lead.
In many ways, it is not surprising these two became friends as both have worked as actors since they were children. Jenna began her acting career when she was age 10 and went on to become a Disney Channel actor. Both gravitated to horror and indie films that focused on character. They both talk about how supportive and helpful their parents were as they treaded the notorious waters of child acting. Where they differ is in their backgrounds; White is second generation in the entertainment industry and third if you count that his father’s uncle was the well-known Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Hynes. In comparison, Jenna’s father works in a California District Attorney’s office and her mother is an emergency room nurse (Shepard & Padman, 2023).
Getting Jenna With It
Jenna Ortega is unequivocally a celebrity who has achieved that status through her talent, hard work, and sacrifice while Percy Hynes White’s situation can be considered to be more of a grey area. While he’s gained accolades for his work on its own merits and auditions, there’s no denying that his legacy has played a role in his success. Cast No Shadow, a 2014 Canadian film, was an adaptation of his father’s book in which they portrayed a father-son dynamic very different to their real one (Bernocchi, 2023). Had his father’s book not been written, the movie based on that book would not have been made. Had his father not been cast in the film in the father role, Hynes White would likely not have been cast as the son. Hynes White would not have been in a position to win the Best Actor Award at the 2014 Atlantic Film Festival for his portrayal. His most recent and one of his more well-known works, “Pretty Hard Cases”, was co-created, and at times written, by his mother Sherry White, who was also the showrunner. Would Hynes White have been cast if his mother had not been involved in the project?
There is a plausible argument to be made to call Hynes White a so called “nepo baby” and view him as predominately an ascribed celebrity. The contrary view is to say that Hynes White had no familial connections on the crew of “Wednesday”, auditioned for the role which launched him into the limelight and that to consider him as solely an ascribed celebrity is overreaching and misleading. This is particularly so when looking at the facts of his long career and the recognition he has received for his work by various different bodies.
While both Hynes White and Ortega avoided the scandals that other child actors who were their peers suffered, they both existed in the same space as Jennette McCurdy, who recently recounted growing up with a damaging stage mother in her memoir, “I’m glad My Mom Died”, published in 2022. The three actors share the spectrum of experiences that children who grow up on film and television sets endure. In a CBC television interview, Hynes White shared that he felt like he picked up everything from his parents. He credited them with having introduced him to an artistic career and letting him “do his thing” (Ahsan, 2022). They never pushed him unduly or tried to steer his career. For Hynes White, that his parents let him be himself was the most important thing they could have done because doing so reaffirmed what Hynes White had wanted to do (Ahsan, 2022).
The intersection of ascribed celebrity, media exposure and the illusive nature of authenticity give rise to an interesting discussion. In an interview with ICON, a culture magazine, Hynes White touched on all these issues, saying that he had been “predestined” to become an actor (Bernocchi, 2023). He pointed out that he had been surrounded by actors or directors since he had been a little child. Every part of his life had something to do with art and admitted that even if he had become a carpenter, Hynes White would have brought something artistic to his work (Bernocchi, 2023).
Jenna Ortega appeared on the Armchair Expert podcast on March 6, 2023, and commented on her experience of working at Disney and at events like “Disney prom” that was held for their child actors. For her, the experience was “really weird,” consisting of mostly stage moms getting photos of their kids together and figuring out who is doing what next. Ortega felt like every time she went to the Disney studio, she was about to be interviewed by six different women. She left high school in freshman year to be homeschooled, a decision she later concluded was a mistake. Leaving a public high school for the isolation of homeschooling caused her social skills to decline (Shepard & Padman, 2023). After that change, everything in her life was filled with “weird people” trying to know what job Ortega was working on next.
Celebrity and the Sacrifice of Privacy
We humans scour gossip, share tweets and save paparazzi photos in an endless attempt to gauge celebrity authenticity and, very likely, as a species we always have. But when the children of celebrities are put at risk, there is a heightened tension. Hynes White’s parents chose to try a balanced approach, as described by Jorge and Marôpo (2017), to managing their son’s exposure to the media. Hynes White has still been in the public eye as the child of celebrities and in some ways more importantly, a working actor since age two. There is an inherent artificiality imposed upon an ascribed celebrity. At issue is the notion that while their famous parent may have worked hard to achieve success, the child has not (Jones, 2023). In judgment, the celebrity followers must take that imposter to task for daring to claim a reputation that they do not “deserve.” The media outlets that clamored for their baby photos will give rise to a media mob that does not care very much whether their attacks are based on facts as they nitpick and savage the child actor’s every move. Many children of established celebrities have worked to build a genuine career in the entertainment industry. Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of musician Lenny Kravitz, has built her own career in the industry but says that the animosity that predatory media sources display fills her with a “deep insecurity” (Jones, 2023). A constant dread can reside inside of the “nepo baby” who uses their talent to build a career that, no matter how hard they try or the success they achieve, everything they built will be portrayed as a fraud.
When we look at celebrities, we strive to discern the authenticity of their existence but when talking about the children of celebrities — especially those who are child actors — that perceived authenticity can be harder to find. Not only are there the questions around their “worth” and how much their childhood has been affected by their parent’s fame, there can also be debates over their capacity to be authentic in the ways we crave, ironically creating an authenticity that is a façade. When your life is under constant monitoring by the media and you film as often as you go to school, have you been given the space to form genuine authenticity and are you ever allowed to show it? This is important as there is an argument that children like Hynes White, who grow up on camera, convey authenticity but that the authenticity of ascribed celebrities and child actors is rejected. The rejection is fueled because it lacks the specific relatability the public wants to see. The average person cannot comprehend the effects of the grueling work that Peterson and McCurdy experienced for little pay on the promise of an “opportunity to develop talents” (Masterson, 2021) and understand Hynes White’s or Kravitz’s upbringing even less; so, they are rejected and their validity questioned.
Many child actors have had very public struggles in their adult life recovering from the high pressure, trauma, and events of their lives on set and in the very exploitative world of Hollywood. One only needs to look at Drew Barrymore or Bobby Driscoll to see how this lifestyle can have a deleterious effect. While Hynes White has escaped the substance abuse that plagued McCrudy or the anxiety issues and socialization issues of Ortega, he was catfished for nude photos when age 13. Even though reported to the police at the time, the images would later crawl back out of the woodwork and be used to attack him on Twitter in 2023 (Saffron, 2023). Arguably, Hynes White was more vulnerable to this abuse because at the time he was perceived by some as a nepo baby and an acceptable target of derision like Lily-Rose Depp.
Van den Bulck (2014) and Tolson (2001) talk about the discourse around this authenticity via JustJared replies and Geri Halliwell’s own attempt and anxieties around portraying that authenticity in her documentary. Authenticity is seen as critical to the long-term success of a celebrity, if the audience thinks they can see the “real celebrity” and identify or somehow connect with them, then their career strengthens. This creates a tension because it is not possible for an audience to know a celebrity authentically. Meanwhile the celebrity (and their team) will work to build a version of him or herself that feels authentic but is inherently, at least on some level, a lie. Tolson (2001) talks about this in terms of “being yourself” as a public performance, “raising your personality a touch” and cites Harvey Sacks’ (1984) ideas of “doing being ordinary” —the idea of being “real” but for the omnipresent panopticon that the celebrity lives in. As Halliwell points out, she cannot make the same kinds of mistakes or causal choices that many “normal” people can — like one night stands— because of the ramifications it could have for her career (Tolson, 2001).
There is also a tension inside of the dynamics around celebrity that relates to class and their place in capitalism which also contributes to the views around ascribed fame, especially so called “nepo babies.” The concept of achieved fame falls more in line with the American capitalistic idea of a meritocracy while ascribed fame is both more accurate to reality and a reminder of the days of aristocracy (Rojek, 2001). This element heavily affects how the audience will see a celebrity — aristocracy is acceptable, but only if they have “earned” it by the individualist, meritocratic standards of the West (Rojek, 2001). For all the advantages the “nepo baby” may have in connections, they are at a disadvantage with the audience.
Gamson (1992) distills the dissonance of the celebrity by boiling it down to “the assumption that people are famous because of who they are, an authentic self, gets left behind as Taylor suggests that he will be who you want me to be. In one, audiences discover; in the other, the audiences dictate.” And nowhere is this highlighted more than in the children of celebrities like Hynes White who are the meeting point of so many different warring concepts. The celebrity culture and apparatuses have been ever present in his life, dictating the shape of his growth and the perception of his authenticity. His lineage and his career at war with each other while the audience hungrily picks apart his life for their own entertainment and gossip about the private life of him and his inner circle. The latest in a long line of privacy violations that is uncomfortably normalized in relation to “famous” children and now in the age of Social Media stars becoming almost an epidemic.
To me, cases like those discussed in this paper are simply proof that more time and consideration needs to be put into the effects of this industry on children. There are obvious cases that can be pointed to as reasons that there are flaws in how we treat children in entertainment such as Barrymore and McCurdy but there are less obvious consequences like Peterson’s experience and Ortega’s social anxiety. Then there are cases like Hynes White’s were while he seems to have avoided many of the potential developmental pitfalls for child actors, he has still been targeted, victimized as a minor, and then revictimized with that event as an adult over shaky allegations and parasocial relationships online (Saffron, 2024). The psychological ramifications of all of this are not clear, we can only look at what occurs publicly and what these individuals are willing to share.
But I feel these are extremely important topics to explore, study and thoroughly trouble. Peterson, Barrymore, McCurdy, Hynes White and Ortega are all actors in the traditional entertainment industries that have at least some kind of regulation in place to protect children but even then, all have been negatively impacted. Entertainment is broadening rapidly and for younger generations kidfluencers and family bloggers are their “ICarly” or “Odd Squad”. These children are in situations not to different from that of McCurdy save that the set is their own home, and their parents aren’t just extreme stage parents but also the director and producers and there are no laws or other adults who can step in to protect them (Masterson, 2021). Some of the first waves of kidfluencers and family blogging children are now old enough to speak out about their experiences. Recently Ruby Franke, the mother responsible for the 8 Passengers family channel, was arrested for how she treated her own children. the Norris Nuts, an Australian family vlogging channel documents many kinds of concerning behavior. Their children are not only constantly on camera but also expected to spend hours to days editing the family’s videos.
Drama and the performance arts are a wonderful thing but pursuing it seriously requires a high amount of emotional and mental vulnerability from the actor to properly embody the role and time spent in unstable and high-pressure settings (Anderson, 2011). It is concerning that there is so little clarity on how these factors can affect children in these situations and such irregular protections in place. When one then adds on the ever-present demands to categorize, evaluate these celebrities’ fame and interrogation of their authenticity as a human being, it feels like a set up for those most helpless we’ve put in the line of fire for our own entertainment. If we cannot even protect a legacy actor like Barrymore from the adult dangers of this industry or allow ascribed celebrities like Hynes White and Kravitz to prove themselves without attacking their authenticity or career, how can we protect the online famous? If we only protect the fact that Ortega and McCurdy must have an education while also working but do not take into account how damaging the isolation that lifestyle can bring, how can we expect to succeed in protecting wellbeing of children from family vlogs? If we do not acknowledge the very real power of imagination, then we will keep creating Petersons.
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