Idolator

The rise of groomed-from-birth-to-be-a-star David Archuleta, the premiere of the Danny Bonaduce-hosted TV show where stage parents compete to be the least crazy ones, and the recent travails of such former child stars as the Spearses and [insert recent TMZ featuree here] have got me thinking a lot lately about the upside to being a child star, for both the parents and the children. Sure, the paydays can be decent in the short run, but the long-term effects can be deadly, from the dreaded, unshakable feeling of having peaked way, way early in life to the current state of celebrity culture, in which any D-lister of yore has the "opportunity" to humiliate themselves on TV and keep their names in the press. Well, yesterday's New York Post story on the current travails of the Jackson family—one is currently bagging groceries at Vons; another is a boomerang child—only served to further my suspicions about the sanity anyone who wants to make their kids a star. Namely, they're crazy. More »