Amanda Bynes, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Jennette McCurdy, Macaulay Culkin.
What do all these names have in common?
They’re the actors and actresses who made the nostalgic and unforgettable shows and movies we would beg our parents to stay up past our bedtime to watch. We would watch these actors while snuggled up in bed with our stuffed animals, as we wind down from the stress of our day at school. But these actors had a completely different and transformative childhood, resulting in trauma and pressures to perform.
Even with changes to child protective laws in place in the film industry after such tales of caution, this role of the ‘child star’ has only been passed down to another generation: the children of YouTube family channels.
Factors impacting Childhood Stars’ Declining Mental Health
To better understand why childhood stars suffer trauma into adulthood, it is essential to analyze the factors and routines of childhood acting.
Zeynep Yasar, a clinical psychologist of the British Psychological Society, suggests that during her time as a child psychologist and protector on a movie set in Türkiye’s film industry, she observed that schedule and acting demands were a baseline pressure that placed stress on these children.
The emotional burdens and personality development issues from playing a character have a greater impact than most outsiders would assume. The characters often assigned to many actors have emotional complexity, difficult circumstances and often result in actors finding detachment of self, a necessary component in playing said charachers.
With these emotional complexities, actors must take on the responsibility of learning to switch between happiness, sadness, fear, and other emotions in the blink of an eye. With children who are in the period of crucial emotional recognition and regulation development, such changes can burden the actor with emotions that are unhealthy for their age. Young children, still gaining their sense of self and understanding of personality, may consume themselves in the character and years later, carry major identity struggles.
This loss of oneself in character is not exclusive to children, but to actors of all ages. In a study on the impacts of psychological method acting, where actors embrace their characters in their personal lives, and make choices based on their character’s psyche, MRI machines detected changes in the actors’ brains. These actors took on the role of Shakespearean characters through method acting, and the experiment revealed that responding in character deactivated the part of the brain that deals with our sense of selves, the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe. Therefore, method acting poses a deeper psychological impact, then causes further difficulty in social environments.
In addition to the emotional and identity development stresses on child stars, Yasar suggests that these actors face “long hours and intense schedules,” which typically stress out adults, let alone children. With the film industry’s constant fear of delay in the filming process, children often work hours that exceed the maximum, leading to burnout and mental health declines.
Over time, restrictions and rules have been made to mitigate this issue. However, even with precautions in mind, children are still susceptible to stress to both their physical and mental health.
How do these two factors impact YouTube family channels?
As we’ve seen on the news, on TikTok, and in countless video essays, YouTube family channels follow a similar pattern in the filming process of their daily activities, which are highly dramatized.
YouTube family channels are families that vlog their daily lives, from the mundane to the highest of highs in life, including marriages, special events, and even pregnancy reveals. However, this content can quickly turn to focus on the children of the family and their major life events, from the accomplishments to the embarrassing moments. A previous few include the ACE family, the LaBrant family, and 8 passengers, which all no longer post online likely due to their scandals or emotional mistreatment of their children.
The University of Chicago brings the dangers of YouTube family channels to light. It explains that these channels often focus their content on children, leading to exploitation, violating privacy, impacting emotional and physical health, and negatively imprinting on children’s social relationships with peers in their schools.
In the same vein as child stars of the acting industry, YouTube family channel children must put on an act of happiness despite the exhaustion that is felt with such constant filming. Paralleling child stars, YouTube family children must work countless exhausting hours. Furthermore, they don’t get compensation for their work in the videos, with only their parents’ ‘care’ being their reward.
The case of the children of the 8 Passengers YouTube family channel shows the extent of mistreatment that children face in these circumstances, and in some ways mirrors child stars.
One of the children, Chad, played a prank on his younger brother and lost privileges to his room. He was made to sleep on a beanbag for multiple months. This, paired with the fact that Chad was sent into the troubled teen industry, guided audiences to put together the pieces of emotional abuse.
With this situation, paired along with the mother Ruby Franke’s refusal to bring her youngest daughter’s lunch to school when Eve had forgotten to make lunch at 5 years old, controversy began.
Even in such circumstances, the children of these channels must act happy and participate in the video, regardless of possible burnout.
With these parallels between child stars and YouTube family channel children, we can see that this new mode of ‘wholesome’ vlogging can end in the same catastrophe as childhood acting has for countless kids.