Public “twerking” episodes, hit and run car accidents, half-naked antics on heavy machinery — it seems that nearly every other day a supposedly normal young celebrity flies off the handle and joins the ranks of the Hollywood crazies.  Those of us living apart from the lavish realm of stardom often speculate as to how these young adults veer so far off  the path of sanity.
Mara Wilson (you may know her as the little girl from the movie “Matilda”) recently wrote an article for Cracked.com entitled “7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insiders Perspective),” that reveals a uniquely sympathetic view toward child performers and the struggles they face while maturing under the pressure of the media.
The article touches on several influential factors that greatly impact the lives of young actors: too much involvement from parents, not enough parental attention and the inability to escape the characters they once portrayed.
Wilson presents great evidence as to how each of these could have a negative effect. However, the portion I found most compelling fell into the category Wilson so eloquently named, “They Get Used to Love and Attention, and Then Lose It.”
As a part of the ever-so-judgmental general public, I often find myself guilty of criticizing the outlandish actions of celebrities without appreciating the fact that these people were literally employed to attract attention at one point in their lives. This is what they have been trained to do; this is their talent. When this desire for attention is accompanied by the universal pubescent struggles to define one’s identity, the results can be bleak. Wilson draws attention to this in her article by reiterating the idea that child performers thrive on their public attention.
“Adults know that infatuation is fleeting, but kids don’t understand this,” Wilson said. “A year in a kid’s life seems like an eternity, and they think anything happening now will happen. Years of adulation and money and things quickly become normal, and then, just as they get used to it all, they hit puberty — which is a serious job hazard when your job is being cute.”
Establishing a personal identity is an incredibly fragile process that, in my own personal experience, begins around the sixth grade and continues throughout the entirety of your college years, if not beyond.
I can remember the first time I told my mom I would no longer wear my Tommy Hilfiger khaki shorts (I was grounded), the first time I painted my fingernails black (which resulted in a  three hour long interrogation session with my father regarding the stability of my psychological health), freshman year of college when my T-shirt size changed from a small to a large (prior to my gaining of the freshman 15 that later justified that jump in size). Even now, I sit in my room with a copy of “Cosmopolitan” magazine on one side of my shelf and Betty Friedan’s feminist manifesto, “The Feminine Mystique” on the other.
The gist of what I’m getting at here is that I, to this day, have not the slightest clue who I am, and I thank my lucky stars each morning that there are not 50 million people watching every move of my journey of self-discovery.
All of this said, I think the moral of Wilson’s exposé on the sensitive nature of child stars is this: we must remind ourselves of the idiotic phases we have passed through as we have made our way into young adulthood. We must sympathize with these former stars on the grounds that they once had more attention than we could ever fathom, and while they search to find themselves, they simultaneously search for something to fill the void that the lack of attention has left behind. And most importantly, we must never be so prideful as to think that in a different circumstance, under the same insurmountable pressure, that we ourselves may not do the same exact thing.