When child stars grow up...

Drew Barrymore is one of the most notorious actors to overcome the perils of childhood stardom (she starting snorting cocaine at the age of 10 and was in rehab by age 13), but what happens to all the ones don't? I think in the past few years, the media attention on famous children has become even more intense -- the expectations for them are not just to represent a certain demographic or stereotype, but also to be a role model in their personal lives. And growing up is hard enough -- I can't imagine doing it in the public eye.

But beyond that, I am fascinated by what stardom does to the psyche, most notably in children -- when a person is so young, still figuring out who they are, and they are treated as if they are the most important person in the world, utterly unstoppable. For one, it completely disrupts the parent/child relationship, when the child becomes the breadwinner and the parent dependent on them -- Danny Bonaduce recently recalled a story in which his mother told him to go to his room, and he sneered at her, "They're all my rooms." He owned the house. And look what happened to him. He shows up naked at premieres, is in and out of rehab, and now makes a living on a reality show about making the next child star. And Dina Lohan is another perfect example; living off her child's stardom, so desperate to be a friend and an equal to her star offspring that she has completely forgotten to be a mother.

What really makes me nervous though, is what happens to all the children who reach their stardom peak as children, and then no one is interested in them when they are older? At such a formative period in their life, when they are treated as so important by so many people, and then forgotten about once they grow up, what happens then? It's almost as if they're taught that growing up is a bad thing, as if they failed themselves and the world when the inevitable happened. They don't have the coping skills a person usually learns as a child, because they were coddled and sheltered as stars, and then they are suddenly thrust into the world as has-beens. Falling from the top of Hollywood must be difficult enough; I think we don't pay enough attention to the implications of shunning child stars, and the actual psychological ramifications of this.

So what's next for Miley Cyrus? We've seen what happened to Britney, to Lindsay, to countless others... But maybe once she goes through whatever she's going through, maybe she'll come out on top, a star in her own right as an adult, like Drew. Let's just hope she's not the next Danny Bonaduce. I think it's best to just leave these kids alone; let children watch their TV shows, support their movies, and leave them out of the tabloids. I love Us Weekly and Perez, but at a certain point, the line needs to be drawn, and I don't think it is right to subject children to that kind of scrutiny.