Episode 5: Happiness vs. Happiness

This past weekend, we got a chance to spend some time with some good friends of ours who happen to live just a few miles from where we are currently located. They have a daughter who is the same age as our son, who is also in the business. They worked together on a project for two months this past summer and our time spent sitting on set gave us all time to get acquainted with each other. Her father and I had some really good conversations about our experiences in this business and it was really refreshing to be able to talk to someone who understood what our lives had become. There was one issue in particular that I thought would make for a good topic for this week’s post.

When we are between the ages of 5 and 18, going to school is our top priority. In addition to getting our education during this time, we are also learning how to behave socially. How to deal with other people. How to behave in social settings. It’s also where most of us meet and socialize with our friends. But what happens when school isn’t there? Or when it is there but you’re not able to experience the socialization process like everyone else because there’s something about you that sets you apart from the other kids? This is another great example of something that parents of child entertainers deal with on a daily basis.

Our friends’ daughter is in junior high school. She has been in the business since she was about 6 and has done numerous projects, including television, feature film, and Broadway. Though she does have a couple of what one would call “true Friends”, her adjustment to junior high has been more difficult than the average kid. No other child at her school does what she does so it’s difficult for them to understand what it’s like. Think back to your junior high years. That time was difficult enough, what with the ever-changing hormones, the need to fit in, and the feeling of being “stuck”. Not quite a little kid anymore, not yet a teenager.  Now, imagine that in the middle of all of this, you are also an actor who gets more attention than any other kid in the school. Not that you want the attention. You don’t think you’re any better than anyone else. You just love to act and happen to be good enough at the age of 11 to do it professionally. So, whenever you complete a two month national tour of a play or finish a three month stint on Broadway, you return to school as an outsider. Some kids avoiding you because they aren’t quite sure how to take you. Some being mean to you simply because they’re jealous. That’s pretty tough for a kid to deal with. But as a parent, what do you do? Do you remove the child from the school and place them in another? Won’t the same issues eventually arise? Do you take your child out of school altogether, going the home school route? What if you’re not able to home school?

My son’s issues concerning school are on the other end of the spectrum. As I stated in an earlier post, we have relocated to another state, so him going to his junior high school with his friends wouldn’t be an option to begin with. But more importantly, the show that he is working on requires him to be on set Monday thru Friday. Therefore, his “school” is an 8x10 room (ok, it’s a little bigger than that) that he shares with his 13 year old cast mate and their tutor. We get to the studio between 8 and 9 am and during the day, he is either on set filming, or in the classroom. There are no other kids on the show and his schedule doesn’t allow for him to be in situations where he would meet other kids his age. On the few occasions that he has been places where there are other kids his age, i.e. the mall or the movie theater, they already know who he is and instead of interacting like kids normally would, they are asking for pictures and autographs. Every so often, he talks about missing his friends and his desire to just be a normal kid at a normal school. But in his next breath, he mentions how much he loves what he’s doing and would miss this if it were to end.

My wife and I tell him often that this isn’t something that he has to do. (Although he must fulfill his obligation to this show because he made a commitment) He can stop acting anytime he wants. But he always says that he doesn’t want to stop. He loves it. He just wishes he could do it while living in our house, going to his school. Now, knowing that you only want what’s best for your child and that you want them to be happy, what do you do? In our situation, there aren’t many options. Whenever it comes up, I talk to him about how sometimes we have to make sacrifices to achieve the things we want to achieve. About how there’s a price for everything and that the price for him being able to live his dream, may be that he has to spend time away from his home, his school, and his friends. My wife has been looking into activities that he can do on the weekend, but again, how does a celebrity make “new” friends?

As I always mention in my posts, this is not a complaint. It’s just another issue that parents in this business have to deal with. While I’m not happy that our friend’s daughter has to go through what she goes through at school, it does make me feel good to have them in our life.  As parents of these child entertainers, we share a common bond. Our kids are happy doing what they do. They would also be happy just being normal. Maybe together, we can figure out the answer to the question: How do you weigh your child’s happiness against your child’s happiness? Stay tuned.