Child Performers Should Be Banned

In the end, education is designed to prepare children for their adult lives and careers. Working in a profession like acting, or training as a football player may be a better preparation for some children’s future than school-based learning. Provided they fulfil legal minimum levels of education why shouldn’t they start their career early? After all, almost every country allows parents to opt to home-school their children even if they have no teaching qualification. Almost all child performers have well-qualified tutors and some child stars go on to achieve high grades in university (e.g. Jodie Foster).

Simply banning child performers will not prevent the possibility of exploitation, merely place it out of reach of scrutiny. At the moment, child performers are official employees and as such their pay, hours and conditions are all monitored by government departments (i.e. the Inland Revenue, Education Ministry, Health and Safety, etc.) and as such must conform to specified standards. When children become amateurs, part-timers or are completely banned there is an incentive to push these limits and hide the extent of children’s involvement. This is only likely to reduce the conditions for children involved.

Children feel pressure to succeed at an early age, be it in exams, on the school football beach or singing a solo in the choir’s Christmas concert. While the stress may be greater for a professional child performer this increase is usually proportional to their talent and aptitude giving them a greater ability to deal with the pressure.

Just as certain scripts call for the casting of children, particular tricks require long light bodies to perform. While no one would encourage abuses of the body (such as eating disorders) why shouldn’t smaller, lighter and often younger competitors use these qualities to their advantage. Similarly early well-regulated training can help to condition a body for a life time of rigorous use. Training while young can help build strength and muscle development into an athletes body that will improve their performance and protect them from injury in later life. Similarly by professionalising and regulating training you give the child access to a whole range of support staff from physios to nutritionists that should prevent the worst abuses. You are unlikely to stop a driven child from training therefore making it as safe as possible is in the best interest of the child.

Modern attitudes to children are a recent cultural development; for centuries children had to go out to work and were treated as adults from a much younger age than today. We should not impose this cultural bias upon those with exceptional talents and supportive families, providing the law prevents them being exploited. Ultimately we must trust loving parents to know best for their own children. A few scare stories should not be taken as representative of the happy and successful performing careers of many talented young people.

The wider consequences of a ban on child performers will be severe. Some sports, such as gymnastics, tennis and ice-skating may collapse without appropriate early training regimes. Television, film and stage dramas would become radically different, and unable to portray society realistically, if they were not able to use child performers. Established classics with key roles for children would have to be dropped or totally rewritten. In film and television, production companies may even go abroad to find a more sympathetic jurisdiction, removing investment from the domestic economy and exposing children to risk in a completely unregulated environment.