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When a child steps in front of the camera, whose dream is it that they are chasing? Their own, or someone else's? The child star has been intertwined with Hollywood’s image for more than a century, from Jackie Coogan’s breakout performance opposite Charlie Chaplin in The Kid to today’s algorithm-fed teen celebrities on streaming platforms. Behind the red carpets and sitcom laugh tracks is a reality far more complicated, with stories of exploitation, media scrutiny, and financial abuse. In an August 2023 interview, former child actor Alyson Stone argued on her YouTube channel that Hollywood “set up [young celebrities] to fail,” pointing to long hours, financial exploitation, and the sudden withdrawal of public adoration as recurring patterns. That pattern, critics argue, has endured for generations and continues to resurface with each new era of entertainment, despite waves of reform.
More than a century ago, Hollywood’s first cautionary tale unfolded in real time. After the release of The Kid, Jackie Coogan became one of the most recognizable children in the world. Audiences adored the wide-eyed boy opposite Charlie Chaplin. Studios turned him into a brand.
Before he reached his teenage years, Coogan’s likeness appeared on an array of products — coats, dolls, toothbrushes, and shoes. At the height of his fame, he was earning what was then reported to be one of the largest salaries in the film industry. He lived lavishly, with estates and even a personal dairy ranch supplying milk to his household. “Other boys went to see Babe Ruth,” he once said. “But Babe Ruth came to see me.”
The illusion of permanence shattered in 1935. On a trip returning from Mexico, a car accident killed his father and two others, leaving Coogan injured and abruptly without the parent who had managed his career. In the years that followed, tensions between Coogan and his mother deepened. By 1938, upon reaching adulthood, he discovered that much of the fortune he had earned as a child was gone.
He filed suit against his mother, demanding access to what he believed was rightfully his. During the proceedings, she argued that no legal promise had been made to reserve the money for him. Under California law at the time, she was correct: a minor’s earnings belonged to their parents.
The case shocked the public and rattled the entertainment industry. In 1939, California passed the Child Actor’s Bill, now widely known as the Coogan Law, requiring that a portion of a child performer’s earnings be placed in a protected trust. It was meant to ensure that no other young star would reach adulthood to find their fortune vanished.
“[The Child Actor's Bill will] prevent another situation similar to that which now faces Jackie Coogan."
- Assemblyman Chester D. Garmon
On paper, reform had arrived. In practice, the vulnerabilities of child stardom proved harder to legislate.
A generation after Coogan’s lawsuit, Shirley Temple became Hollywood’s most iconic child performer. With her bright eyes and carefully styled ringlets, she was marketed as the embodiment of innocence during the Great Depression. Yet even her early career reveals the uneasy dynamics of child performance.
Before her rise to global fame, Temple appeared at the age of three in a series of short films titled 'Baby Burlesks', which featured toddlers in parody roles that mimicked adult scenarios. In her autobiography, she later described the productions as a “cynical exploitation of our childish innocence,” recalling that she and other children were costumed and directed in ways they were too young to understand.
Temple also recounted punitive practices on set. She described being placed in what was referred to as a “black box”, a sound booth used to isolate children who misbehaved, where they were made to sit on a block of ice as punishment. Whether framed at the time as discipline or efficiency, such methods underscored the imbalance of power between child performers and the adults who managed them.
"They had two sound boxes on our set. One of them had a big cake of ice in it, and when any of us misbehaved we were sent one by one into the black box to cool off and think about it. In the dark, with the door closed."
- Shirley Temple
If childhood itself was a commodity in Hollywood’s golden age, adolescence proved far less marketable.
By the late 1940s, Bobby Driscoll had become one of Walt Disney’s most prominent young stars, appearing in Song of the South and voicing the title role in Peter Pan. Disney reportedly described him as “perfect,” and biographer Marc Eliot later wrote that the studio head saw in Driscoll “the living embodiment of his own youth.”
Yet even as Peter Pan was in production, studio executives were reportedly discussing whether his seven-year contract should be reconsidered. Driscoll’s voice had begun to deepen; acne marked the end of his boyish image. The qualities that had once made him marketable were, almost overnight, liabilities.
In later interviews, Driscoll recalled arriving at the studio only to be told he was no longer needed. The transition from celebrated child star to expendable adolescent was swift, and, for many performers, disorienting.
Like others who age out of childhood fame, Driscoll struggled to adjust to life outside the studio system that had once structured his identity and daily routine. He later spoke about difficulties in school and the social isolation that followed his early success. As steady acting work disappeared, instability followed.
Driscoll battled substance use during his adulthood, and his career never recovered the momentum of his Disney years. He died in 1968 at the age of 31. For a time, his death went largely unnoticed by the industry that had once promoted him as the embodiment of youthful optimism.
"I was carried on a silver platter and then dumped into the garbage can."
- Bobby Driscoll
The dangers facing child performers are not limited to the studio gates. In some cases, the greatest pain lies far closer to home — the place where they should feel the safest. In the 1980s, Judith Barsi was establishing a small legacy for herself as both a beloved face and voice on television screens across America. But like many child stars before and after her, she was burdened with the pressure of being financially responsible for her entire family.
Although by this time the industry had addressed safeguarding issues such as financial exploitation and labour mishandling, there was little protection afforded to young stars outside of film sets. While Barsi’s characters and films brought joy to audiences, she lived a domestic life marked by fear and violence, with an alcoholic father who often mistreated her and her mother. The struggles the young actress endured became both emotionally and physically apparent, as she developed compulsive behaviours such as pulling out her eyelashes and bursting into hysterical tears.
Her death at the age of 10 at her father’s hands revealed a tragic reality, not about financial exploitation or a child star maturing, but about how many young actors may endure abuse privately within the four walls of their homes, sometimes rooted in parental jealousy. It is believed that one motive behind the abuse was her father’s sense of inferiority at the knowledge that his young daughter was the household’s primary earner and the source of their lifestyle. Her final film was 1988’s All Dogs Go to Heaven, alongside veteran actor Burt Reynolds, who was reportedly deeply affected by her death and is said to have recorded the film’s final lines nearly 70 times, in which his character comforts Barsi’s as he dies.
"[The film's director, ] Don Bluth was so heartbroken over the death of Judith Barsi that he based Anne-Marie's design and mannerisms on her, to honor her memory and cope with the loss. Burt Reynolds was also so heartbroken that he asked if he could redo his "Goodbye isn't forever" lines, and did so while looking at a photo of her. Reportedly, it took Reynolds nearly 70 takes to get the lines right, and in the final film his voice can be heard breaking, especially on the line, "I'll miss you too."
- IMDb
As Hollywood evolved, and some lights dimmed while others began to shine, the struggles facing young stars continued to resurface in new and equally troubling ways. Today, however, we are far more aware of the pressures fame places on child performers, many of whom now speak openly about their experiences in adulthood. In 2022, former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy released her autobiography I’m Glad My Mom Died, an emotional account of the complicated relationship she had with her emotionally abusive mother, who projected her own dreams onto her daughter.
McCurdy portrays her late mother as an agent of chaos, and herself as someone in need of balance within a household defined by dysfunction and uncertainty. Throughout her childhood, her mother experienced relapses of breast cancer, which left her emotionally reliant on her daughter and increasingly determined to live out her own dreams through her. McCurdy writes of the need to appease and effectively parent her mother amid the uncertainty surrounding her health and mortality. “She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy. But now that I have it, I realize that she’s happy and I’m not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited.”
“She was obsessed with making me a star,” she recalls, an obsession that proved both emotionally and physically consuming, with Jennette being introduced to calorie restrictions at the age of 11 and later developing an eating disorder. As McCurdy grew older, her mother became increasingly fearful that her daughter might develop cancer and began conducting invasive examinations on her.
"I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her."
- Jennette McCurdy
McCurdy, who retired from acting in 2017, wrote in her novel: “I'm allowed to hate somebody else's dream, even if it is my reality.” As a child, Jennette, like Barsi and Coogan most likely did, felt overwhelmed by the pressure of being financially responsible for her household, although she was almost numb to understanding why she felt that way. She speaks of an emotional conversation she had with her grandfather, during which he tells her: “A little girl shouldn't have to worry about her entire family.” The remark confused her because, in her blissfully unaware naivety, she believed that it was her responsibility. “‘I just…’ He steps closer to me. ‘I just think…you deserve to be a kid.”
The conversation that Jennette McCurdy began with this novel is by no means new, but her voice is revolutionary in its unfiltered discussion of the consequences of being a child star - physically, emotionally, mentally, and financially. She speaks of her anger and discontent at being denied ownership of her own life for so long, and of the grief she carries for her younger years. Her message, although not new in subject, brings greater awareness to the exploitation of young entertainers and helps give voice to those who came before her, those like Driscoll and Barsi, who never had the opportunity to speak openly about their own experiences.
"So much of my life felt so out of control for so long. And I'm done with that being my reality. I want my life to be in my hands. Not an eating disorder's, or a casting director's, or an agent's or my mom's. Mine.
- Jennette McCurdy
From Jackie Coogan in the 1920s to Jennette McCurdy nearly a century later, the stories of child stars reveal an industry that has repeatedly profited from exploitation, abuse, and a lack of protection. Legal safeguards may now secure earnings under the Coogan Act, and public conversations may continue to raise awareness, but the emotional, psychological, and domestic vulnerabilities that come with childhood fame remain largely neglected. The image of childhood stardom is, in many ways, a deceiving fantasy disguised as a blessing.
In adulthood, many former child stars gain the independence to speak about the pain and loss they have experienced, the loneliness of an isolated childhood on film sets, and the internal fears of growing up under immense expectations. Their testimonies, some loud and some quiet, do more than expose individual suffering, they challenge the very structures upon which the child entertainment industry is built, and question the foundations of Hollywood itself. When a child steps in front of the camera, two questions loom: Is this their dream? Or somebody else’s?
The cycle will inevitably continue, with each new ‘season’ of Hollywood recasting a generation of child stars.
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