Why Child Stars Go Crazy

My mom started out as a model when she was a baby. Her dad had died right after she was born and her mom was not the brightest star in the sky. Someone said my mom was a cute baby and should be a model, so my grandma took her to a modeling agency and TaDa! my mom got hired as a model.

Most parents weren't up for pimping out there kids in the 40s, but Seattle didn't have many jobs for an infant. So my grandmother packed up my mom and her 10-year-old sister and moved them away from their support network and off to Hollywood. My grandmother got my mom an agent and my mom started working steadily until she was about 17.

She was in a LOT of movies. Most of them well known. She was Eve as a child in Three Faces of Eve, the daughter of the family in Days of Wine and Roses, The Buccaneer, Ten Commandments, Playhouse Theater, etc., etc., etc. Lots and lots of movies, TV shows plus lots of modeling as a kid = super crazy adult.

There's one thing they don't tell child stars. Once you get to be about 15 they can hire an adult and don't have to deal with all the laws around hiring kids.

This is why child stars go crazy. They go from being super important and famous to being nobody. They can't get a job and when they get to be an adult they usually are out of practice as an actor and no one cares about them anymore.

For my mom and many other child actors as well there was also the no money problem. My grandmother was not super bright so the money was all spent when my mom was old enough to need the financial boost to get her through to adulthood.

My mom was also angry. She'd never had a childhood. She missed school to do movies and when she returned to school the teachers were often resentful of her.

My mom told us quite a few stories about working on reports and assignments while she was on set only to have the teacher throw them in the trash right in front of her when she returned to school. She remembered the teachers being jealous of what they thought of as her "glamorous" life so they told her she was stupid and her work was worthless. The only teacher she remembered fondly was one of the studio teachers she would visit once she was in the Motion Picture Retirement Home that no longer exists.

My grandmother was also a terrible advocate for my mom. More worried about her getting the next job than her wellbeing. My mom was cruelly pinched by other actors and directors so her crying would be more realistic, she was on set longer than she should and worked really long hours waiting for her turn to shine.

So when I see Lyndsay Lohan and other former child stars go off the rails I always think about how hard their lives were to that point and how no one in their late teens and early twenties is equipped to deal with the sense of failure they experience when going from starlet to nobody. 

The parents still need to be better parents and advocates for their kids if they're going to push them into this kind of life. A group of former child stars from the 40s and 50s, my mom included, work with SAG to try to help parents be better advocates. Because Hollywood would treat kids better if all the parents were better, but they often choose to work with the "easy" parents who demand nothing from the studios. These are the parents that allow their kids to be worked more hours than they should or their babies to be kept under the hot lights longer than they should and smeared with cream cheese and jam to look like they're newborns. When the Screen Actors Guild runs workshops for parents of child actors the parents often say things like, "But what about my child's career?!!" This is often about their infant being taken advantage of. What career? 

But this blog wouldn't exist if I didn't also think that former child stars need to grow up and take responsibility for their actions. Yes, their childhood might have been terrible, but so was mine and you just need to get on with things.

This is my mom in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker.

 She's the girl in the front, on the left.

Girl in the middle.

Perfect Comic

This is so perfect for this blog!

Changing My Diet - On the Metabolically Broken

I have Hyperprolactinemia and Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) one of the many problems with this condition is that it's horribly under diagnosed. The other is that this is not a problem rooted in the ovaries, but it is a pituitary gland disease. For this particular disease the pituitary gland swells and it secretes excess prolactin. Since I'm not a doctor, I suggest you use Google from someone qualified to get more information.

My main point is that I have this disease. It went undiagnosed for so long that it ended up breaking my endocrine system, but now that my hormones are managed I'm feeling better.

However, my body is still pretty broken in that my triglycerides are off the charts and if I don't get them down my endocrine nurse is going to have her own heart attack. I also have tragic blood sugar issues. The disease also caused me to gain weight, which I now need to/want to lose.

But right now my body is pretty messed up metabolically and along with the disease  the root of this is....dum dum dum...in my childhood. I know, you're shocked.

So when I was 9 I was told by my mother that I was fat. Because she is just a kind and loving mom like that.When I look back on photos I realize I wasn't fat, but reality and my childhood were not really in agreement anyway.

She kept telling my I was fat, which was super helpful to me in both the development of my sense of self as well as wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do about it. She was the person who fed me. I was 9. It wasn't like I had the wherewithal to go do some research on body development and nutrition.

My mom decided to take me to a doctor that  "helped" overweight children and he put me on the tragic 1,000 calorie, low fat, high carb diet that helped make my body the trainwreck it is today.

I was on this diet of horrors until I was in my 20s and my lovely husband helped me to get a grip on reality. Unfortunately the damage had already been done and this along with my disease left me confused and lost.

In my quest to get healthy while I was sick I did lots of research on nutrition, micro-nutrients, alternative diets, etc. My family and friends had the poor pleasure of living with me through the many trends of no sugar baking, putting kale in everything and a whole lot of other nutrition ploys I tried in an attempt to stop feeling like I'd been run over by a car.

So now my body is healing, but I'm still not healthy. I need to change the way I eat so I can get the triglycerides down, manage the blood sugar and lose the weight.

So I'm on Atkins. Which sucks. Atkins is a low carb diet that should include veggies and starts at 20 grams of carbs a day. I have found that I need to stick to less then 12 grams of carbs a day or my body goes off ketosis, which is how you can measure weather Atkins is working or not.

So my body is so metabolically broken that it freaks out if I have really any carbs at all. I think that is so weird. It also means that I eat meat and eggs. That's pretty much it. I dream of brussel sprouts, but if I try to eat one, my body goes of ketosis.

This means that my body is SOOOO sensitive to what I eat that it is like dealing with a twitch control on a video game. One little push and my avatar falls off a cliff.

For a woman raised that veggies are better than anything, fat's the devil and carbs are great. This is a huge shift for me. I keep trying to sneak veggies into my diet, but then my body freaks out. It's so weird!

So I now have a list on my fridge of what I can eat so I stop trying to add in veggies and I'm stuck on this for probably a year. That seems to be how long it should take for my body to reset and stop flipping out.

I am not happy about this. So when you eat your brussels sprouts and your beets think of me kindly.