I love that this title on here just says entitlement selfishness narcissism my memoir

Child Stars, entitlement, selfishness, and narcissism.

Okay, this whole time I've been shining the light on access from only one direction,

the outside world getting access to the child.

But access is bi-directional and I want to reverse directions and talk about what happens when the child

performer gains unique access to the outside world?

What happens when child performers do to fame and the industry accrue copious

access to wealth, material luxuries, status, and power. What traits and behaviors show up?

Well, let's make this fun and pretend you're the child actor. So go back in time to your child itself.

Remember, that means you're also at an earlier stage

of development, depending on your age,

your brain cannot separate fantasy from reality, you don't have fully formed logic or

rationality to reason through experiences, you can't consider multiple

perspectives of what's going on, your subjective experience is dominant.

So now, picture yourself as a child performer.

Your days are spent taking dance or acting classes, learning lines,

driving across town for auditions. You start booking work, and now you're

making money, which you hear is going somewhere to a college fund or something. Your guardian is now on your payroll even though you don't know what that means and you vaguely grasp that they had to stop working their job to help drive you to audition.

So they're gonna take some of the money you make,

so there's food on the table.

And you're not gonna touch that money

until you're 18, which is like light years away. Money is basically an imaginary thing at this point.

...