‘Early Fame Is Like CTE’: Christy Carlson Romano on Hayden Panettiere and Child Stardom
3 min readI couldn’t sleep the other night. My 7-year-old keeps crawling into bed with me—her older sister is in a telling-spooky-stories phase. I picked up my phone. Hayden Panettiere died. Crushed. Another performer I grew up with, gone too soon.
Kid actors have something major in common: rejection. We’re rejected from auditions more times before we’re 10 than most people accrue in 10 lifetimes. Those of us who make it are given the adoration of saints—and then, if we don’t climb to A-list fast enough, we’re torn down as if we’ve committed some unspeakable mortal sin. All before our frontal lobes have fully formed.
Is it any wonder so many of us struggle with addiction? The industry gives us the wound and then acts surprised when we reach for something to treat it.
The former child actor exists in a category the world does not know how to hold. We are children when the public wants to feel protective of us, professionals when the industry wants to profit from us, and spoiled celebrities when we eventually show symptoms of having been both.
Early fame is like CTE. Not as a diagnosis. As a way of thinking about repeated impact. We now have language for youth sports: protocols, helmets, parents worried about concussions. But we have almost no language for what happens when stress, scrutiny, rejection, adult pressure, and the collapse of privacy become the architecture of a childhood.
Young performers are still treated as exceptions. Lucky exceptions. Cute exceptions. Talented exceptions. Exceptions whose labor powers one of the most profitable storytelling machines in the world, while their mental needs are treated as inconvenient or irrelevant. Social work be damned.
As a society, are we not starting to see that notoriety comes at a cost, even when it’s decades later? Unlike some, I have had access to real help over the years. Help that addressed not only my thoughts but my nervous system. I am not theorizing. I am describing what I finally found when I kept looking after decades of confusion. Many former young performers do not have that kind of access or motivation for hard-won answers.
Some years ago, I created a podcast called Vulnerable and interviewed many former young performers. I have sat across tables, raised money for the union’s underfunded youth program, and asked uncomfortable questions to industry insiders in the past. Shockingly, the public response is often familiar: Why are you so bitter? Why are you exploiting the names of people you once worked near?
![raven, hayden panettiere, kirsten storms and christy carlson romano photo by m caulfieldwireimage for abc cable networks group](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/5b1a6182-9a1d-45cd-b8fc-1df512aecfaf.jpg?crop=1xw:1xh;center,top&resize=980:* ""Tiger Cruise" Los Angeles Premiere")
Raven Symoné, Panettiere, Kirsten Storms, and Carlson Romano in 2004.
Calling out incongruence in the only community I was raised to know is not bitterness. It is grief with a mission. Responsibility gets passed around. Stage parents blame producers, producers blame parents, networks blame culture, and culture then blames the child when the child becomes an adult in pain.
By then, the young performer is no longer cute enough to protect. They are a cautionary tale. A headline. A person expected to be grateful for the extraordinary childhood that may have cost them an ordinary self for life. They can’t even qualify as a statistic because not enough formal research has been done on this issue.
This is human and relatable in that the world always sees trauma after the fact. It sees the adult unraveling, not the child adapting. It demands the scandal, not change from the system. It sees the addiction, not the architecture or the years when intervention could have mattered.
Right now, there are children smiling on screens. Children working long days or nights. Children learning how to charm adults before they even know themselves. Children being praised for their maturity when what they need is protocols from safe adults. We put youth athletes in helmets and pads. We invented entire sciences around protecting them from long-term damage. Why can’t we pad the children paid to make the world smile?
I am thinking of Hayden, her daughter, the people who loved her in real life—not as a headline, not as a symbol. I am thinking of my own daughter still upstairs, still crawling into my bed afraid of the dark, and how badly I want her to grow up in a world where children are not asked to become consumable before they become whole.
We need to stop calling the truth bitterness just because it interrupts nostalgia. And we need to stop assuming former child performers are fine because they look pretty, sound grateful, book a job, and smile on cue. Some of them are not unscathed. Some of them are simply still performing.