The Privilege of a Private Childhood and not of a stolen one

“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Over the past few months, my social media feed has filled with newborns. Friends are getting married, building homes, and deciding whether there will be children in them. I am at that age now, when the future begins to arrive in photographs, and I find myself thinking more often about the past: the childhood I had, the importance of a good one, and the world children are growing up in today. Alongside those ordinary announcements are family vlogs that invite strangers into the daily lives of children, and something about that invitation has begun to trouble me.

I have a quiet respect for people who recognise that they may not be able to parent well, and for those who simply do not want to bring children into this world for reasons privy only to themselves. When a former supervisor asked what I thought of having kids, I thought it sounded intellectual to say, “Not really, with global warming and things like that.” I did not know what I was talking about. I had borrowed the shape of a conviction without having arrived at one myself.

I love children. I was always the kid looking after the children younger than I was. As I grew older, though, love acquired a companion: fear. For all that I cherished about my childhood, there were parts of my upbringing I hated, and I wondered what I might unknowingly carry into someone else’s. Was I too absorbed in my career to care for a child? What if I had a secret temper waiting for the right exhaustion to uncover it? I thought adoption was beautiful, and believed my heart could hold a child I had not birthed. Yet I was frightened by things I had seen, and things that had not happened, by the possibility of loving someone so much and still being unable to protect them. I do not know what is in store for me. I did what the modern girl of the twenty-first century would do and made sure my options stayed open.

Writing is how I make room for questions like these. My mind is crowded with information, and putting it into sentences gives me somewhere to begin. Sometimes another person reads what I have written and offers a thought I could not have reached alone. Sometimes, in trying to explain the question, I find part of my answer.

I want to let you into my brain a little. When someone tells me what happened to them, good or bad, a movie begins playing inside its convolutions. Experiences from my childhood have taught me to step into a story, feel around for the person telling it, and then cross to the other side to play devil’s advocate. It can be exhausting to feel so present in something I never lived through. Some might call this being an empath. I hesitate over the word because I can also detach and look at a situation quite objectively. But when the person at the centre is a child, or someone without the education, understanding, or resources I have had, that distance becomes harder to keep.

I grew up very privileged. I was the firstborn granddaughter in a large house, born to two well-educated people with flourishing careers. I never knew financial strain. I went to one of the most sought-after schools and had tutors for music, ballet, tennis, badminton, French, abacus, the Trachtenberg method, crafts, and musical instruments. My parents were well connected. We travelled within the country and abroad three or four times a year, stayed in luxurious hotels, and always had at least two cars. If you were taking an inventory of a fortunate childhood, mine would have been difficult to overlook. Where, then, were my problems?

There were deaths. Family members seemed to drop like flies, and some losses changed our standing in society, which mattered greatly in that time and place. There were accidents, injuries, and grief that altered the emotional weather of the house. I was sometimes acting out in the craftiest ways that the adults around me had to find craftier ways to rein me in. I was barely six when the second death, that of my maternal uncle, broke something in our family that took almost twenty years to recover from emotionally. I became a hypervigilant child who grew up too quickly, sometimes because the adults around me were not behaving like adults. The size of a house cannot tell you how a child feels inside it.

It really did take a village to raise me. There were trusted drivers, cooks who cooked because my mother couldn’t, governesses who took me to classes, and neighbours who became temporary babysitters without charging a thing. I remember the people and moments of those years with startling clarity. Some gave me a place to rest. Others left me with things I am still trying to put down.

My middle-school history teacher, of whom I am still terribly fond, may never know the extent of her influence. On a day when every other teacher seemed to have a complaint, she believed in me, and that belief changed how I saw myself. We talk about learning not to depend on external validation, but a child being seen with kindness is no small thing. Her faith made room for the possibility that I was more than the horrid things other people said. There was also the nun who was my principal, who noticed me when I could not cope with my grandfather’s death. I remember them because they made me feel that someone was paying attention to what hurt.

I remember the other kind of attention, too. The third-grade teacher who brought chocolates for the class and gave them to everyone but me left behind a sense of unworthiness that outlasted the moment. I know now that her behaviour was not a measure of my value, but what a terrible thing for a woman over sixty to do. A stranger tried to cop a feel on the street when I was barely twelve, and helped shape my understanding of what being a woman might mean. An aunt told me I would amount to nothing and constantly criticised my appearance in comparison with the rest of the family, leaving a wound that took a very long time to heal. A distant cousin thought it funny to comment on the colour of my skin. I still stay out of the sun, although I love basking in it.

I do not believe we are obliged to become what our childhoods predicted. I do believe we carry their impressions into adulthood, sometimes in habits so ordinary that we forget where they began. Perhaps that is why I cannot look at children growing up online without wondering what they will carry. If a remark from one relative can follow me into the sunlight years later, what might it mean to grow up with strangers commenting on your face, your body, and your behaviour? What happens when the people responsible for protecting you are also responsible for publishing you?

I know there is an uncomfortable contradiction in asking this. Like so many children of the early and mid-2000s, I grew up watching the Disney Channel. Before Miley was simply Miley, she was Hannah Montana to me. I had a two-week crush on David Henrie and could see no sensible reason he would not like me back. These performers helped introduce me to a culture beyond my home. Their playlists became mine, and their social lives offered my generation a compass for how to interact. Even now, Robert Pattinson’s Antinous in The Odyssey is first Cedric Diggory in my mind, and Edward Cullen arrived long before Batman. Our memories keep their own cast lists.

As a child, I was considered a good vocalist, and I once asked my parents whether I could go on The X Factor or some other talent show. They refused. Naturally, I cast them as the villains. They were obstructing the perfectly reasonable course of events in which David Henrie heard me sing and fell irrevocably in love with me. It was as though they had never watched the Camp Rock movies. I thank them now, although my younger self would have had a great deal to say about that.

When I think about the routes into film, television, and performance before 2010, before social media became so central, I can imagine several forces at work. There was talent so remarkable that the world seemed determined to witness it, the kind of argument people might make for Shirley Temple. There was the hope of an income, perhaps even a way out of poverty. Macaulay Culkin has described a childhood in which his parents and seven children shared a one-bedroom apartment, and later recalled wanting to return to school without being heard.

There were parents trying to live an unrealised dream through their children, and children whose faces caught someone’s attention in a grocery store. Some wanted to perform. Some were carried along by what the adults around them wanted. The possibilities could overlap, just as they can for young athletes whose lives begin revolving around the prospect of turning professional.

The parents, too, resist neat categories. There are those who advocate for their children, guard their home lives, and remain in the background while a child shines. There are those who control relentlessly, restrict education, or allow earnings to take precedence over emotional wellbeing. Others discover that they enjoy being famous themselves, or begin to treat a child’s success as an extension of their own identity. Love, ambition, financial need, and the pleasure of attention can exist in the same person. That is what makes the question harder. A parent may believe they are opening doors while becoming less willing to hear that their child wants one closed. I am less interested in assigning a diagnosis to that parent than in asking who is listening when the child says they have had enough.

Drew Barrymore has spoken of drinking at nine and using cocaine at twelve, long before social media could make childhood constantly visible. I admire her candour, while recognising that admiration does not tell me everything about her life. More recently, Elias Phoenix shared footage of his mother berating him over a piano audition and described what he says was an abusive childhood. I found those videos deeply disturbing. There is something difficult to bear about watching a child’s talent become the occasion for their distress.

In 'I’m Glad My Mom Died', Jennette McCurdy describes a childhood shaped by her mother’s ambitions and control, and the difficulty of understanding harm when it comes from someone you love. Ariel Winter has also spoken about the damage public scrutiny did to her self-esteem, and about finding support with her older sister. These accounts matter because they give the people who lived these childhoods — room to describe them. A smiling photograph or a successful career could never have told us the same story.

Other lives have moved in directions an audience might never have predicted. Bridgit Mendler went from Disney to an MIT master’s degree and co-founded Northwood Space. Josh Saviano, who played Paul Pfeiffer in The Wonder Years, became a lawyer. Some performers leave the industry, some stay, and some discover that the work they want to do looks very different from the work that first made them known. I want to be careful about calling any of those choices a verdict on whether they turned out well. A quieter career can be a chosen life, and a flourishing career can conceal difficulties we know nothing about.

Britney Spears and Keri Russell both came through The Mickey Mouse Club. One became a world-renowned pop star, while the other stole hearts in Waitress. Britney’s public crises and struggle over her conservatorship became part of the spectacle around her. Keri’s life, seen from a distance, can look enviably complete: a career, children, and Matthew Rhys. But even that comparison reveals how easily I mistake the view from outside for knowledge of a person. Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling were fellow alumni, too. One became a world-renowned pop star, and the other became Ken. The trajectories are different. They are not a reliable measure of how it felt to live them.

Orlando Brown, who made people laugh in That’s So Raven, has spoken publicly about addiction and his efforts to recover. I am also glad to see Lindsay Lohan working again. We may hope and pray for the people we grew up watching, but they do not owe us a version of recovery that reassures an audience. Some former child stars find ways to change direction, some struggle to loosen their hold on fame, and luck plays a part that is difficult to measure. When we say someone failed to grow up with their audience, I wonder how often the audience failed to allow them to grow at all.

The industry has changed, but many of the accounts emerging from it make clear how little protection some children had. Drake Bell has publicly described being sexually abused by dialogue coach Brian Peck. Stories of exploitation make it impossible to treat every childhood spent entertaining us as a fortunate one. The fact that we loved what those children made, does not settle what making it cost them.

The concern about money is hardly new. Jackie Coogan discovered at twenty-one that the fortune he had earned as a child actor had largely been spent by his mother and stepfather. California’s original Coogan Law followed in 1939. The requirement to protect 15 per cent of a covered child performer’s gross earnings in a blocked trust came through a later overhaul, effective in 2000. In 2024, California enacted further protections for children earning money online, extending Coogan protections to covered online creators and creating a separate earnings scheme for children featured in qualifying family content. The details matter, but so does the question beneath them: why should a child have to grow up before discovering whether the adults around them preserved anything of what their work earned?

Then came YouTube, which was a blessing in my life. Sal Khan taught me things I needed to understand, and other people on that platform taught me what the people around me could not. I still turn to TikTok and Instagram for basic life skills, including how to use the washer and dryer properly. I cannot pretend that the internet has only taken things from us. It has made knowledge, company, and possibility available in ways I remain grateful for.

It also offered children new ways to perform, become known, and families new ways to make an audience out of everyday life. With a family vlog, the home itself can become the set. A child may be filmed while eating, arguing, crying, recovering from disappointment, or simply trying to be left alone. If the material is family life, where does the working day end? Where can a child go without becoming part of the story?

The Ruby Franke case disturbed me beyond belief. She pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse and was sentenced in 2024. One case cannot stand in for every family that records its life, but it does leave me thinking about the distance between what viewers are shown and what children may be living through. From the Gosselins’ reality television years to channels built around couples with several children, some of them homeschooled, there is a question I cannot put aside: who gets to see beyond the version the family publishes?

Homeschooling and unschooling are separate subjects, and both provoke strong feelings in me. I recognise that education at home can work for particular children in particular circumstances. Those exceptions have not dispelled my unease about how well parents can prepare a child for a world they cannot reproduce at home. My concern grows when the arrangement narrows a child’s world, limits their education, or keeps them beyond the view of other adults. School can be a refuge from an unsafe home, a place to find a chosen family when your own makes you feel like an outsider. My own teachers showed me that a school can also wound, so I do not imagine it is automatically safe. But I value the possibility of another adult noticing. I come from a family of geniuses, and even they have gaps in what they know. How can two people be everything to several children at different stages, especially if they are also their teachers, managers, employers, and audience? I worry about any arrangement that leaves a child with nowhere else to turn.

There is a difference between sharing an occasional family photograph, helping a child pursue something they enjoy, and building a livelihood around access to their private life. That difference matters when we talk about responsibility. So does the child’s freedom to refuse. A cheerful yes to being in a video cannot answer every question about where it will travel or how long it will remain available. And when a family depends on the income, I wonder how easy it is for a child to say no without feeling that they are letting everyone down.

Something is revealing about the now-familiar photograph in which a baby’s face is hidden beneath a heart or a smiling emoji, as if the parent is trying to hold pride and protection in the same frame. I understand the urge to show off a baby, to let the world see the person who has rearranged your own.

I wonder how easily that joy becomes entangled with wanting our lives to be admired. Covering a face can be a thoughtful precaution, but privacy also depends on what surrounds it: the names, locations, daily routines, and intimate stories that remain available to strangers. The relationship becomes more complicated when that attention begins to support the household. The parent may remain the authority while the child becomes the breadwinner, an unsettling arrangement in which the person being told what to do is also helping pay for the life around them.

Earning the money does not necessarily mean being allowed to decide how it is spent, what is shared, or when the camera stops. An ordinary disagreement about school, privacy, or wanting an afternoon to oneself can acquire the weight of an adult’s financial anxiety. A parent may hear a child’s wish to stop filming as a threat to the family’s future, while the child may begin to experience care as management and affection as something entangled with their usefulness. They may be providing for the household while still depending on those same adults for comfort and reassurance, and I cannot help wondering what happens when those two needs pull against each other.

Part of raising a child, I think, must involve learning to remain curious about a mind that will not always agree with yours. There can be guidance and necessary boundaries alongside a willingness to listen, to explain a decision, and to accept that a child’s refusal is not automatically an act of defiance. Consent needs to remain a conversation as they grow. A baby cannot understand what public exposure means, and an older child’s enthusiasm for being filmed should never settle the question for the rest of their childhood. Asking before recording, accepting an answer without bargaining, and revisiting what has already been shared are ways of showing that their wishes matter. I want children to have the freedom to think aloud before they know exactly what they mean, to make ordinary mistakes, and to learn from them without an audience insisting that every earlier version remain available for inspection. They should be able to outgrow a choice that once delighted them, including the choice to perform, without being accused of ingratitude for the opportunities it brought. A parent’s disappointment may be real, but it should not become a debt the child must spend their life repaying. Loving someone as they grow must leave room for discovering that the person they are becoming wants a different life from the one we had begun to imagine for them.

There is also the darker audience, the one a parent may never see. You do not need to know your way around the Tor Project to encounter disturbing attitudes towards children online. Even an ordinary Reddit thread can reveal how carelessly a stranger may speak about someone else’s child. The work of the Child Rescue Coalition, whose technology helps law enforcement investigate the sharing of child sexual abuse material, is a sobering reminder of risks beyond the comments we can see. The Internet Watch Foundation has also warned about ordinary photographs of children being manipulated into abusive imagery using AI. Protection has to account for more than the familiar creepy uncle or the religious leader whose public goodness conceals something else. It must account for people who can bully, copy, and manipulate images from a distance. The responsibility for abuse belongs to those who commit it, but adults still owe children care in deciding what to make available.

Even without that worst possibility, there is the loss of a future choice. A child who has been public for years may later want a career far from entertainment, or may, like me, feel drawn to the idea of living off the grid. That wish becomes harder to honour when an audience already has an archive of their life. I do not mean that they can never build something different. I mean that they should not have to begin by negotiating with a version of themselves other people were allowed to keep.

And then there is the quieter question of mental health, which worries me as much as the visible dangers. An adult may see a successful video where a child is trying to understand what makes the adults around them pleased. If excitement, affection, or reward repeatedly follows the footage that performs well, what might the child learn to offer? I worry about a young person beginning to confuse being loved with being interesting enough to watch, or believing that a difficult feeling becomes acceptable only when it can be made useful to the family.

Research cannot tell us that every child will respond this way. The American Psychological Association identifies links between appearance-focused social comparison and poorer body image or depressive symptoms, while the National Academies cautions that the evidence does not establish a population-wide causal relationship between social media and adolescent mental health. Much of that research concerns young people using platforms, rather than children whose lives are made into content by adults. We should be honest about that difference. It leaves questions about family vlogging that deserve attention, without giving us permission to predict a diagnosis for every child in front of a camera.

There is, however, a wider body of work on what happens when approval feels conditional. In retrospective studies, perceived parental affection tied to meeting expectations has been associated with fluctuating self-esteem, internal pressure, and resentment. That is not proof of what happens in a vlogging household. It does give weight to a question I cannot shake: if a child becomes important to the family’s success, do they still feel equally cherished on the days when they have nothing to give it? A short-term reward may look harmless to the adult handing it over. The meaning a child makes of it may last much longer. A future therapy bill, if there is one, would account for only a fraction of that cost.

There is also the habit of watching yourself from the outside. If a child learns to anticipate the camera, the edit, and the comments, how much freedom remains to discover what they feel before wondering how it will look? Growing up already involves trying on versions of yourself and discarding them. I want children to be able to abandon an interest, change their mind, or be awkward without feeling that they have broken a promise to an audience. A public identity can become another expectation to manage, particularly when strangers keep asking for the younger, funnier, more agreeable child they first encountered.

Privacy matters within the family as well. A small interview study involving ten families found that adolescents could appreciate parents sharing family moments while still objecting to embarrassing photographs and wanting a say in what was posted or removed. It did not establish the mental-health effects of commercial vlogging, but those ordinary negotiations are revealing. A parent may see a sweet memory where a teenager sees an exposure they never agreed to. If even a family photograph can require a conversation, an income built from a child’s intimate life surely deserves more than an assumption of consent.

What would it feel like to bring a parent your fear and then find that fear turned into a story for strangers? Would you bring them the next one? I am asking about trust, about whether home still feels like somewhere a child can be unguarded. There may also be a difficult loyalty to navigate: gratitude for the opportunities, love for the parent, and discomfort with the way the opportunity is being used. A child should not have to decide whether protecting their privacy makes them ungrateful. Nor should the family’s need for income become a burden they are expected to carry quietly.

Virality adds another uncertainty. Fifteen minutes of fame can leave behind expectations that last far longer than the attention itself. I wonder what happens when the views fall, when an audience becomes cruel, or when a child no longer wants to perform the part that made them popular. Even praise can become difficult to live without if it has been allowed to organise your sense of worth. Charli D’Amelio has wondered publicly whether she was dissociating through parts of her early fame. Her reflection is her own, and it is enough to make me want more room for young people to explain their experiences in their own time. They should not have to reach a crisis before a wish for distance is taken seriously.

I do not have a complete solution, but I think our responsibilities can be made clearer. Earnings should be protected and properly accounted for. A child’s refusal should be respected even when stopping the camera costs money. Education, friendships, rest, and access to trusted adults outside the business need room of their own. Platforms should provide meaningful ways to report exploitation, limit the circulation of intimate material, and help young people seek removal of content posted about them. When a child is working, someone whose income does not depend on that work should be able to advocate for them. A trust account is necessary protection where earnings are involved, but money saved for adulthood cannot settle every question about what was surrendered to earn it.

The rest of us belong in this conversation, too. I cannot write as though I was never part of the audience. Child stars made my life better. They were friends through the television, and I am grateful for the comfort and imagination they brought into my home. I also want to ask what I am rewarding now when I watch a child’s distress, family conflict, or embarrassment because it has been made available to me. Feeling affection for a child on a screen should make me more willing to respect a boundary. I would like us to be capable of letting a child become less visible without treating that absence as something we have been denied.

I began by counting the square footage of a house because material privilege is so easy to name. The education, the travel, the lessons, and the freedom from financial strain were real advantages, and I do not want to disguise them as anything else. There was also the history teacher who saw beyond the complaints, the principal who noticed my grief, the village of people whose care made my days possible, and parents who could refuse the talent show I thought would change my life. Recognising what I had does not require me to pretend that nothing hurt. It asks me to hold the injuries alongside the people and possibilities that gave me room to grow beyond them.

Even now, there is a privilege in the act of telling you this. I can choose which memories to offer, how much detail to give, and where this account ends. I can tell you about the chocolates and leave another memory alone. The people I was at six and twelve do not have to be made entirely available for you to understand the person writing now. That choice feels especially precious when I think of children whose stories are being told before they have the language to tell them themselves.

I said at the beginning that I had kept my options open. I keep returning to what that freedom means, and to how much of it rests on things I did not earn. Recognising my privilege asks something of me now: to care about the choices left to the children whose lives I watch. They deserve to arrive at adulthood with room to change their minds, and with parts of themselves that have never had to belong to an audience.

The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young

By William Blake

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.