I care about the art—but I care just as much about the artist: child actor's growing up

I care about the art—but I care just as much about the artist.

As a mental health therapist, I think often about what happens when a child becomes a character before they have had the opportunity to fully become themselves.

We tend to remember child stars through the characters they played.

We remember their faces. Their voices. Their humor. Their mannerisms. The catchphrases. The clothes. The confidence. We remember the way they made us feel when we watched them.

For many of us, those characters were more than entertainment.

They were mirrors.

They represented the child who felt different. The teenager who didn't feel understood. The Black girl who finally saw someone who looked like her being funny, talented, desirable, intelligent, complicated, or simply allowed to take up space.

And that matters.

It matters that a young person on television may have helped another young person feel seen.

It matters that fans formed emotional attachments to these characters.

It matters that people grew up alongside them.

But there is another child in that story who is often forgotten.

The child behind the character.

The child who went home after filming.

The child who still had to navigate family relationships, friendships, adolescence, identity, insecurity, conflict, grief, fear, pressure, boundaries and belonging.

The child whose nervous system did not know that the cameras had stopped rolling.

The child who could make millions of people laugh while privately experiencing things that had nothing to do with the storyline being filmed that day.

And this is where I think we have to be particularly careful when talking about former child actors.

Because the public often says:

"But that's who she was."

No.

That was a character she inhabited.

There may have been pieces of her in that character. There may have been tremendous joy in playing that person. There may have been genuine connection between the performer and the role.

But a child actor is still a child.

They are developing their identity, their boundaries, their understanding of relationships and their sense of safety while simultaneously being asked to perform versions of themselves for public consumption.

And if that child experiences significant hurt, harm, danger, exploitation, humiliation, instability or other overwhelming experiences during those formative years, the relationship they have with their younger self can become complicated.

Not necessarily because they hate who they were.

Not necessarily because they are ashamed of that child.

Sometimes distance is a form of survival.

The nervous system doesn't organize memories the way the audience does.

The audience remembers:

"I loved that show."

The actor may remember the schedule.

The audience remembers the character's bedroom.

The actor may remember what happened before they walked onto the set.

The audience remembers the laughter.

The actor may remember what it took to produce that laughter.

The audience remembers a particular year as a beloved period of television.

The person who lived through that year may remember an entirely different emotional landscape.

That distinction is incredibly important.

Trauma can disrupt the continuity of identity.

When overwhelming experiences occur during childhood or adolescence, a person may later experience parts of their earlier life as strangely distant, fragmented, inaccessible, or disconnected from their present sense of self. Sometimes people describe feeling like they are looking at an old photograph of someone they recognize intellectually but don't necessarily feel connected to emotionally.

And when that earlier self is also a public figure?

The complexity becomes even greater.

Because millions of people may have a stronger relationship with the younger version of you than you do.

Imagine being an adult and having strangers tell you how much they miss the person you were at twelve.

"You were my childhood."

"You made me feel seen."

"I wish you were still like that."

"I miss that version of you."

Those statements may be loving.

They may be sincere.

They may even be profoundly meaningful.

But they can also create an extraordinary psychological tension:

Everyone else gets to preserve a version of you that you had to survive becoming.

That younger person belongs to you.

But she also belongs to the public imagination.

And those are not the same thing.

We have to make room for both truths.

A former child star can have been enormously important to an entire generation and have had a complicated relationship with the period of life in which we knew them.

The character can have given people representation and the person who played that character can feel disconnected from that era.

Fans can have experienced genuine comfort through that character without the actor owing anyone continued access to that version of themselves.

This is where compassion has to replace entitlement.

Because when we say, "She doesn't seem like herself anymore," we have to ask:

Which self are we talking about?

The self we knew?

The character we loved?

The child the industry presented to us?

Or the adult who has spent years trying to determine who she is when she is no longer required to perform for anyone?

There is a profound difference.

And perhaps that is one of the most painful realities for people who grew up watching child actors:

We can miss who someone was to us without having any idea what it cost them to be that person.

The child on the screen may have helped us survive our childhood.

She may have given us language.

She may have made us laugh when we were lonely.

She may have shown us a possibility of ourselves that we hadn't yet imagined.

That impact is real.

But so is her humanity.

She was not created for our nostalgia.

She was a real child having a real childhood—or, perhaps more accurately, attempting to have one—while millions of people were watching.

And when the director said "cut," her life continued.

The series ended.

The character remained frozen in time.

She did not.

She grew up.

And she deserves the psychological freedom to determine what those years mean to her now.

Maybe she loves that girl.

Maybe she grieves her.

Maybe she feels protective of her.

Maybe she feels angry about what she experienced.

Maybe she remembers certain things vividly and other things feel strangely far away.

Maybe she feels all of those things at different times.

We don't know.

And as clinicians, we should be cautious about pretending that we do.

But we can know this:

A person is always more than the most visible version of themselves.

Especially when that version was created while they were still a child.

So perhaps instead of asking former child stars to return to the person we remember, we should offer something much more generous:

You don't have to be her anymore.

You are allowed to become whoever came after her.

And perhaps the greatest way to honor the character who once made us feel seen is to extend that same gift to the human being who played her—

the freedom to be seen as a whole person, rather than endlessly remembered as a child.

I care about the art—but I care just as much about the artist.