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May 09, 2008
Next child star?



Have any of you been watching VH1's I Know My Kid's a Star series?

The premise is a group of ten children and their mothers (+ one dad) compete in a series of challenges to see who is ready to be the next 'child star'. Most of the child were eight to twelve years old, with your basic range of talents - acting, singing, dancing - in varying degrees. Each week someone goes home and in the end, the winner gets a deal with an agent and a bag of cash.

The idea of judging the parents as well as the child was particularly interesting to me. The point in tossing the parents in the mix was to see if they were ready to make good decisions for their children plus if they were capable of helping, not hindering their child's career. Clearly some of the parents were over the top lunatics and others were projecting their own lost Hollywood dreams on their child.

Of course this paragon of programming has a really grounded stable host and judge (not) in Danny Bonaduce. At one point, he took the mothers on a tour of spots where young stars died or got arrested. I give him credit for that and for at least being honest about the problems Hollywood helped fester in him.

As all the kids and parents were living in a house together, we've gotten to see the cattiness of everyone. Bad behavior from the moms was as prevalent as from the kids - probably not a shock. You know the old quote about Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Those scorned women have nothing on some of these moms.

I know there are always people who are happy to make a fool of themselves on TV but I must have been an idiot to presume people would have some class with their children. Some of the mother's were absolutely wacko. The fighting, cursing and bickering were over the top - accusations of cheating, hair extensions and back stabbing were nutty.

By the finals, it was downright ugly.

One pair included LA acting coach Helene and her twelve year old daughter Cheyenne. It seemed dear mom has been preparing this kid for the competition since she was born. Genuinely super talented, Cheyenne seemed to start strong but never show anything new. And as the show went on, her mother seemed to come unraveled and paranoid.

They were joined by only sane people on the show, the mother and daughter pair of Shannon and McKenzie, a former Alabama beauty queen and her daughter. I completely expected high drama here but instead they turned out to be really nice people. The mother was by far the nicest and appeared to have the best adjusted child. She improved the most over the show by far.

While waiting for the final decision in the dressing room, Shannon turns to her nervous nine year old daughter McKenzie and says:

Have you given it your all?
Have you worked hard?
Have you learned anything?
Then that's all that matters.

What? Rational thought? A parent who didn't feel the need to slave drive her kid and let her child know she was loved and good enough? This isn't reality TV worthy!

And it was fitting that they ended up winning.

Of course more paranoia set in with the runner up's mother.

"As far as Cheyenne goes, the problem was that if she was actually doing badly, it would have been a different story. That's one thing we weren't used to. They were intentionally trying to make her look bad," Helene said. "They tried to confuse her and confuse me, and I felt like at that point, they had their person picked. They just wanted Cheyenne to look bad."

Yow. But she's forgetting one thing - at the finals, who wins isn't really all that relevant. It is the lead up to that were someone could be putting in a fix.

In stunning fashion, Shannon says she doesn't even know if they'll push for the acting career right now and instead they might slow things down. They haven't even decided if they'll move to LA. She actually is putting her child's needs first.

"We're going back and forth. McKenzie's not ready to move out there. I've made it very clear that these are her dreams and what she wants out of life, so until she's ready, you know…

A true stage mom is constantly pushing, pushing, shoving, shoving while their kid is sitting back going, "Mom, can I just be a kid?" That's why I don't consider myself to be a stage mom, because I always tell McKenzie, "Baby Girl, if this ever feels like work to you, it's time to quit."

Eventually this probably will be work for McKenzie but at least for now, she and her family going to get to do it on their own terms. Here's hope we don't see her or any of these other kids as stops on a future Danny Bonaduce's tour of Hollywood's seedy spots.

But I still feel like I've been licking a box of envelopes watching this series.


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