The story recounts the story of the “Fossil sisters”, three girls adopted by an eccentric British collector who then leaves them in the care of his great-niece and a nanny, with dwindling funds. The three girls begin careers on the stage, while still children, in order to pay the bills. Near the end of the book the most beautiful, Pauline, is offered a Hollywood contract. She accepts it, in order to pay for her sister Petrova, a talented dancer, to train in Europe. 

As a child it was a satisfying ending. As an adult, knowing about Harvey Weinstein, it read like Pauline selling herself to fund her sister’s dreams. I wanted to yell at her: the price is too high! Don’t do it! 

In real life, though, most children offered up to the god of showbiz are sent by their own parents — a decision as unfathomable as the willingness of ancient Canaanites, according to the Old Testament, to sacrifice their own children to the god Moloch. When so many child stars come to such miserable ends, why do it? But perhaps, again, we might find a clue in other, equally disturbing religious practices attributed to the Canaanites, and condemned in the Hebrew Bible.

The latest child star to be sacrificed to the gods of showbiz is the actor Hayden Panettiere, who was found dead over the weekend aged 36. I loved her as the Cheerleader in Heroes, and found her sympathetic as troubled country star Juliette Barnes in the musical drama-soap Nashville. But according to the memoir she released earlier this year detailing her addiction and mental illness, experience of domestic violence, and grief at losing custody of her daughter, Panettiere’s celebrity came at tremendous cost. 

Nor is she anywhere near the first former child celebrity to have grown up deeply troubled. Earlier this year, too, former child actor Daveigh Chase was found dead in Los Angeles, killed by sepsis after a years-long struggle with substance abuse. Drew Barrymore, who had — like Panettiere — acted since infancy, was notorious in the Nineties for wild partying, rehab, a suicide attempt, and a lot of being nude in public and on magazine covers.

A still more notorious just-about-survivor is the singer Britney Spears, whose parents pushed her into acting as a tween and who was just 16 when she sang “Hit Me Baby” in 1998. Spears’ later mental health difficulties were the subject of intense tabloid fascination in the early 2000s, along with those of her fellow child star Lindsay Lohan. But where Lohan eventually withdrew from public life, settling in Dubai, the conservatorship imposed on Spears in 2008 would see her deprived of full adult autonomy while continuing to work. Though unable to control her own finances or even remove her birth control, during her conservatorship Spears released four major albums and completed several world tours.

Still darker, less verified rumors swirl around the children of showbiz. There’s a whole P. Diddy rabbit hole, for example: the rapper and producer has been accused (and acquitted) of sex trafficking, and allegedly held multi-day drug-fueled “freak off” parties which were, according to rumors, sometimes attended by underage celebrities. (After the death of Daveigh Chase, a clip resurfaced of Diddy inviting her, then aged just 12, to “an after-party”. I hope she didn’t go.) Among the rich and famous, it appears, the kind of sexual license now notoriously associated with the Epstein circle was perhaps simply normalized. Hayden Panettiere herself claims to have experienced a kind of celebrity grooming: in her memoir she describes one woman who first befriended her, in her teens, before maneuvering her into situations where she was pressured to have sexual contact with much older celebrity men, including while trapped on a yacht some way out to sea. If true, it seems there’s more than one Ghislaine Maxwell out there.

Who knows what comparable assaults other child stars have endured? And given the risks, and the notoriously high rate of attrition, why would any parent willingly propel their child into this seductive, exploitative, amoral world? Perhaps, again, we can glean some hints from the Old Testament. 

In Leviticus 18 and 20, the injunction not to sacrifice your babies to Moloch is, to modern sensibilities, strangely placed. The context is a warning to the Israelites against adopting Canaanite practices described as “detestable customs”. But most of the injunctions specify not religious rituals but practices we’d call “incest”: that is, prohibitions on sexual intimacy with family members or the spouses of family members. 

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This seems, on first glance, an odd juxtaposition. One interpretation is that all these prohibitions relate to religious practices, which for the ancient Canaanites included sexual rituals. But whatever the truth of that ancient world, it’s still relevant today in the subtle but profound connection it draws between different ways that natural family relationships can become corrupted. 

What child sacrifice and incest have in common is a shocking inversion of parental instincts we consider so natural as to be almost universal. Most parents, human or mammal, instinctively seek to protect their young; child sacrifice ghoulishly inverts this, for example in the archaeological remains discovered at ancient Canaanite Carthage. Incest, too, is taboo more or less universally across human cultures, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed. In this context, again, the alleged incestuous Canaanite rites again appear as the detestable practices Leviticus says they are.

I’m obviously not suggesting that children pushed into showbiz are literally sacrificed to Canaanite gods. Nor am I alleging a literally incestuous relationship between these children and their parents. But it’s clear that when a child is placed under pressure to perform as Panettiere was, at auditions, from pre-verbal babyhood onward, the adults making that choice for them are sacrificing important elements of their normal childhood. Meanwhile Freudian psychoanalysis describes as figuratively “incestuous” those parent/child relationships that remain over-identified and enmeshed, such that the child can’t reach full adult independence. And there’s a parallel between those two detestable Canaanite practices, in that their modern analogs — sacrificing a child for economic gain, or perhaps status, while blurring the boundaries between parent and child — are profoundly unnatural relative to normal parental instincts. And, where child celebrity is concerned, at least figuratively speaking these forms of profound parental failure often appear together. 

In Panettiere’s memoir, the way she describes the relationship she had with her mother makes it appear, to put it mildly, strange and lacking in boundaries. Panettiere outlines first how her mother, herself a small-time screen and stage actress, signed her infant daughter up for a modeling contract at eight months old. By the age of five, Panettiere had a well-established acting career. The mother-daughter relationship itself was plainly always deeply entangled: very much the kind an old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalyst would have called at least figuratively “incestuous”.

Panettiere writes of her own childhood that “Disappointing her was one of my biggest fears”. Her mother seems to have transferred all her acting ambitions seamlessly onto her child, and simply expected Panettiere to comply. As Panettiere puts it: “Her dream had become mine, and mine had become hers.”

A similar level of strangeness and enmeshment seems to have characterized Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Back when the conservatorship was imposed, he described her in legal papers as “an adult child in the throes of a mental-health crisis”. In other words: he refused to allow her to grow up, then continued to make a comfortable living off his artificially infantilized child-celebrity daughter. 

Spears later described the conservatorship as “abusive”. Her father continued to control every aspect of her life until she finally won a legal battle to end it.

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Barrymore also seems to have had a strange relationship with her mother, in which ordinary caregiving seemed weirdly missing. She recounts that, while she was still a minor, her mother took her to parties at the notoriously wild Studio 54, instead of to school: a radical abdication of the duty to keep your daughter safe, in favor of enjoying celebrity access through her. Barrymore later emancipated herself from her own mother at the age of 14. 

Similarly, Panettiere describes how, by her late teens, she began to find her mother’s low-cut tops and party behavior uncomfortable, and sought to leave behind the working relationship for a more normal, mother/daughter dynamic: “I just want you to be my mom now.” But her mother didn’t want that. In Panettiere’s account, she just retorted: “You owe me.” Their relationship never recovered. When the memoir was published Panettiere’s mother, Lesley Vogel, dismissed Panettiere’s account, claiming the drama was all “to sell books”. The Independent reported that Vogel declared that it was she, in fact, who had “chosen the no contact route” in relation to her daughter.

Why do some former child stars achieve adult independence, while others struggle? Drew Barrymore still hasn’t fully reconciled with her mother, but she seems comparatively stable, and has hosted a daytime talk show since 2020. Lohan is now married to a Kuwaiti financier, has two young children, and mostly leads a private (presumably extremely comfortable) life in the Emirates. Spears, by contrast, has refused to reconcile with her father since the conservatorship ended, despite reported pressure from other family members. Earlier this year, she checked back into rehab in April following an arrest for driving while intoxicated. Others, such as Panettiere, Daveigh Chase, and many other child stars, are simply no longer with us. 

Perhaps Pauline Fossil would have survived Hollywood just fine, avoided all the Ghislaines, and just ended up with a financier husband and large collection of Hermès scarves. Or perhaps not. Who can say from the outside what makes the difference between the children who survive their offering to showbiz Moloch, and the ones who get consumed? Is it the enthusiasm with which a child is sacrificed? The intensity of showbiz-parent enmeshment? The horrors encountered in Moloch’s fiery belly, or indeed on the yachts laden with pervy old rock stars?

Whatever the precise formula that produces the maximum of psychological damage, perhaps the only safe recourse is to listen to Leviticus. That is, rather than trying to find a low-impact way of sacrificing your child to Moloch, just don’t sacrifice your child to Moloch. Alternatively, if you prefer levity to Leviticus, there’s the 1935 message of another Noel — not Streatfield, but Coward — to every sharp-elbowed Theatre Mummy pestering him for auditions:

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington
Don’t put your daughter on the stage!

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

Rae was 18 when she broke into our cultural imagination amid the first Covid lockdowns. She choreographed and mimicked dances in TikTok videos, and turned her millions of followers into devoted listeners. Her first self-titled album, released the following year, preached the #GirlBoss feminism of a bygone era: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you.” It was a flop. But then she let go of her self-determined pop vision, gave up attempted originality. Instead, she became something cleverer, more kitsch, consciously emulating Britney Spears and Bjork — less a pop star than someone who wants to be a pop star. Since her transformation, every single she’s released has shot up the charts to wide critical acclaim.

Her success is an index of TikTok’s power as a star maker, and the way the app has dominated not just the music industry, but fame itself. But it’s a Cinderella not lacking for a dark side: TikTok fame endangers and takes advantage of teenage girls.

Rae’s metamorphosis followed a clear-cut, and volatile, path familiar to earlier generations of teeny-pop fans raised on the Disney Channel: that of the young star who shed the snakeskin of adolescence into something sexy and avant-garde. Rae’s formula was formula. Her innovation was not to innovate at all. And so, she fulfilled the American Dream that Disney, and now TikTok, promised: an ambitious cheerleader from Louisiana — where her idol Britney Spears also grew up — could be shepherded by managers and executives waving more cash than her family had ever seen, to become a global superstar. But it’s never that simple.

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There are Disney princesses, and then there are Disney Channel princesses. Disney brought up a generation of young people who went home after school and were parented by their televisions. As society shifted, so did Disney: the soft traditionalism of prince-charming love stories gave way to high-schoolers who fought, laughed, danced, and sang for millions of young watchers; the mediators of what life could and should be. Then those teenagers rebelled, turning their lives inside out. It’s now just as much a well-trodden path to success as the one it was originally defined as a fall from: Rae became, in the words of Rihanna, “a good girl gone bad”.

The formula may be the same, but the medium has changed. The Disney Channel is a shell of its former self, with only about 100,000 viewers while 68% of teenagers go on TikTok every day. The Wild West of TikTok influencers — paid through lucrative brand deals but without contracts or stability — means that you can shoot to enormous success as a teenager without any guardrails or support.

Yet even in the Disney-dominated era, there were signs of trouble. Britney Spears shaved her head and was hounded by paparazzi; Miley Cyrus swung naked on a wrecking ball; and so on. These tendencies have found their next shape in TikTok’s algorithm.

The day after Rae flashed Coachella’s crowd and was videoed by thousands, the child star Sophie Nyweide died at 24, from a what authorities suspect was an accidental overdose. Nyweide was thrust into the spotlight when she was just 5, and her death was a sobering reminder of what fame’s aftershocks can do to the young and vulnerable. Nyweide’s death, like Britney’s breakdown, is another example of the industry’s Faustian bargain: give up control and we’ll make you into a star.

Girls like Spears, Amanda Bynes, and Miley Cyrus, who got famous as kids on our televisions, turned their Disney fame into stardom at brutal costs to their lives. They were left unable to make the usual mistakes of being a teenager without the eyes of millions upon them. This was not an incidental side effect. As a new book by the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl, argues, the industry was designed to feed on girls — and then discard them.

Gilbert suggests that two forces, porn and paparazzi, transformed a generation of women, impelling them to switch away from powerhouse idols like Madonna in favor of sexualized but virginal and girlish figures like Britney Spears and Kate Moss. Real women, in control of their music, were replaced by girls being shaped by their managers. This was the era of American Beauty, Britney Spears with schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, a 2003 Vanity Fair cover declaring: “It’s Totally Raining Teens!” The early Oughts showed girls that “there was only one way to exist in public”, Gilbert writes, “and it was a trap.”

TikTok has brought this trap to the doorstop of every teenager in the world. Want to use your body for likes, money, and fame? The siren app beckons. The algorithm rewards nudity, dancing, and oversharing personal trauma. The writer Roxane Gay, after sinking glassy eyed into the algorithm, observed how “right there, in plain sight, is TikTok, a platform hosting the new pornographers, savvy, hungry creators willing to push and test and give, more and more and more”.

Take Jenny Popach (whose real name is Roselie Arritola), who had 7 million followers by the time she was 15 and posts hyper-sexualized dance videos with captions like “when men can go to jail for being with you”. She rakes in a small fortune from brand deals but still has braces. When a Bloomberg interviewer asked her mom about her daughter getting famous, she said: “We loved it. We loved the attention…. I knew I’d be famous one day, I believe in destiny, and I believe in manifestation, and I believe Roselie is that.”

Kids like Popach proliferate on TikTok, dancing, making money, and dreaming of the Addison Rae model of fame: where a video can turn into a record contract, and then into the main stage at Coachella. Nearly a third of TikTok users are under age 14; and any scroll on the app will lead you to prepubescent girls, dancing, trying on makeup, playing at adult femininity but for an audience that includes not only their peers, but millions of unknown grownups, too. Gilbert’s book tracks the horrific “countdowns” that magazines and public figures had for Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and the Olsen twins to turn 18 and be legal for sex. Popach’s 18th birthday has elicited countless such fantasies from men on TikTok.

By sharing your own life, you may eliminate some of the power of the paparazzi who stalked Spears so brutally, but you also have to accept your place in the industry’s ecosystem; or as Gilbert writes: “Young women in the public eye had been framed across media as sexy, entertaining, uncomplicated dolls, paid to entertain but never complain. Some understood the bargain.”

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Addison Rae bought into the bargain. She only got famous the same year that Britney gained control of her finances. Her tongue-in-cheek references to Spears show her ability to alchemize pop’s darkness into fun self-defense. She teased the paparazzi with her likeness to Britney when she was photographed walking down the street in pigtails reading Spear’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me; and in her music video for “High Fashion,” she danced next to a bottle of Spears’s perfume. Her success, we can hope, is a direct rebellion against the more exploitative forces that trapped Spears. She references Spears so frequently not just because she admires her, but because she isn’t her.

Still, as Gilbert’s book reminds us, the misogyny inflicted upon Britney and her peers never went away: we internalized it. Scroll through TikTok, and the exploitation paradigm feels like everyone’s reality. Back in the Disney days, says Gilbert, it was shocking to imagine that girls “could be most liberated while on their knees”. Now it would only be shocking to question that.

Disney doesn’t make stars anymore; stars make themselves, and TikTok profits when they do. TikTok, like Disney before it, makes its money from teenage girls, and those girls hope to get fame back from it. Some, like Addison Rae, may get everything they want from it, and emerge unscathed. But most who idolize and emulate her will not be so lucky.

Her most revealing video, “Not My Responsibility”, is so dimly lit that she’s barely visible at all; it feels more like a confrontation than a seduction. In the shadow, you can just make out that she’s wearing a bikini top, while her whispered voiceover challenges the viewer for all the ways they might judge her body. But of course, keeping her body relatively concealed didn’t actually stop people from judging it: a paparazzo shot of her wearing a perfectly decent strappy vest and shorts kicked off a tiresome round of body-shaming followed by clapbacks to the body-shamers.

“Not My Responsibility” was released when Eilish was 18, by which time she’d passed from “promising” to “successful” to “terrifyingly, staggeringly famous” in a remarkably short time. The documentary The World’s a Little Blurry (new to Apple TV) tracks this extraordinary path, bringing home how bizarre her life has been: fly-on-the-wall style footage shows her with her family, working on music with her brother in his shabby-looking bedroom, then heading out out to play the global superstar. Her designer stage outfits go through the family washing machine.

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Other stars say they’re like their fans, but with Eilish — at least at the start — it’s really true. In concert footage (recorded pre-Covid), she performs her songs of melancholic ecstasy to an audience of girls who look just like her — one mass of self-ironising, tragic girlhood with their eyes closed in the bliss of pain and their phones held high. In Salt Lake City, she descends from the stage to embrace them. “They’re not my fans,” she tells the camera later, “they’re like a part of me.” She’s still a child at this point: 17 years old and about to record her gigantically successful debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We All Go?

That’s near the start of the documentary. Towards the end, we see another encounter between her and the public, from about a year later, by which time When We Fall Asleep has become number one in 37 countries and made Eilish the youngest female artist to top the UK album chart. She’s doing a post-gig meet-and-greet in New York, but it doesn’t have the spontaneous affection of the earlier scene. Instead, it goes off-script and Eilish walks away.

Of course, someone comments on social media that she was rude. Eilish then berates her team (which includes her mother) for leaving her exposed:

“I don’t want anyone who knows who I am, who is any sort of fan or knows a fan, to see me in any sort of awkward situation. It’s embarrassing and I have to keep smiling and if I don’t they hate me and they think I’m horrible.”

She sounds like any teenager dealing with a fraught social situation; she sounds like no other teenager in the world, negotiating global scrutiny of her every scowl.

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The film, directed by R. J. Cutler, is a document of the costs and calculations of fame — and the way those costs and calculations are heightened when the subject starts young. Eilish has now been living in public for about a quarter of her life, and the film shows her to be both adept (like most teenage girls, social media is her natural element, and every time she makes a decision she asks herself what the internet will say about it), and overwhelmed.

Because how can you foresee what an existence like this will do to you? And how much protection can the people around you give? There’s a scene where a representative from Eilish’s record label discusses the song “Xanny” with Eilish and her mother. The song is critical of substance abuse; but, counsels the label rep, “maybe you grow up and feel differently and then get dragged for it.” Eilish’s mother is outraged, partly at the suggestion of Eilish compromising her voice (although elsewhere, she also questions her daughter’s use of suicide themes), but mostly at the implication that Eilish might “fuck up” in her future.

The spectre of the fuck-up. The label rep feels it and Eilish’s mother feels it and Eilish feels it too, because everyone knows that this is what happens to those who become famous when they’re young. The one-time child actor Mara Wilson, best known for starring in the film of Matilda, recently wrote about this in a column for the New York Times which looked back on her own experiences in light of the recent reassessment of Britney Spears’ career.

Wilson calls it “The Narrative” — the arc from prodigy to tragedy that defines Spears, and Judy Garland, and Drew Barrymore, and Corey Haim, and River Phoenix, and Aaliyah, and Lindsay Lohan, and any number of others you can think of. These children were all exposed to the corrosions of an industry in which punishingly hard work is demanded and sexualisation is standard. (From the age of six, interviewers would ask Wilson whether she had a boyfriend.) And their falls, says Wilson, were all helped along by prurient journalism and the public that consumed it, something now amplified by the panopticon of social media.

They were adored for their youth, then tried as adults in the court of reputation. But a child star, however autonomous they might seem, is still foremost a child, and to say otherwise is to write a licence for those who would abuse and exploit young people. Or as the writer Tavi Gevinson (a famous style blogger at 12, editing her own magazine at 15) put it in an article for New York Magazine, also inspired by Spears: “even if someone is precocious, it is their youth that makes them precocious. If you can still be considered ‘mature for your age,’ you are not an older person’s equal.”

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There’s another potential price to child stardom, though — a price that’s less horrific than mental illness or sexual violence or addiction, but that is still colossally bleak. What if early fame leaves you fixed forever in the shadow of the child you were? Gevinson is an intimidatingly good writer, but there is still a part of me that, having followed her career since she was a tween, reflexively and superfluously adds the words for her age (she is now 24). And Wilson, though she has evaded “The Narrative”, is still essentially famous for being the woman who used to be the girl who was Matilda.

When you’re beloved for being young, ageing can only make you a disappointment. John Logan’s play Peter and Alice imagines the real-life templates for John Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland meeting as adults. “Here’s a burden: the only reason anyone remembers me now as Alice in Wonderland is that I decided to sell my hand-written manuscript of the book,” Alice tells Peter in the play:

“But do you know why I sold the manuscript? Because I needed the money. To heat my house… Now, is that the Alice people want to know? Or is it just possible they would rather remember that little blond girl in the dress, eternally inquisitive, impossibly bold, never changing and never growing old?”

For Eilish, never changing and never growing old has a particularly grim implication. In the documentary, we see her looking at her journals twice. Once near the start of the film, when she excitedly shares her doodles and lyric ideas; and once when she’s 18, looking back on how, aged 14 or 15, she would lock herself in the bathroom and self-harm. Some of the girls who adore her for articulating that pain could make a snare of their love, demanding that Eilish go on hurting for them, rejecting her if she threatens to leave them behind.

Becoming an adult means letting things go as well as embracing the new experiences of maturity, and there’s a grief in that — even if what you’re letting go of is grief itself, as you resolve the anguish of your teens. Those who truly survive child stardom are the ones who get the opportunity to grow up, reinventing themselves in public as their adult selves. Think of Taylor Swift, Thomas Brodie-Sangster or Justin Timberlake, who no longer really count as child stars now: they’re just stars, their career beginnings a mere anecdote eclipsed by ongoing success.

The test of whether Eilish lives through her fame or ends up destroyed by it isn’t only in whether she “fucks up”. It’s also in whether she’s trapped forever as this Billie, or gets to become the next version of herself. In the future where she makes it, we’ll never talk about her age at all, and the incredible, inhuman fact that she had to navigate all this when most people are still messing up their homework will be forgotten.