You didn’t say if the child wanted to do this. Not thinking of it as a career isn’t the same thing - perhaps she never thought such a thing was possible.
I must confess that our beautiful and talented daughter at 10 signed with a manager in New York and started acting professionally, with no ill effects. She wanted to do it, and in fact loved doing it. Her grades never suffered and she never missed a homework assignment. When she was no longer interested, she stopped, but that might have been due to moving to a place where getting to auditions was a pain.
The fact is, no one but a blockhead would sign a child without being damn sure that she (not the parents) wanted to perform. The kid is on stage, or in front of the camera, not the parents. I don’t know about music, but I never saw my kid audition, either for a manager, an agent, or a casting director. They can tell pretty quickly if the kid is interested or not, and no one wants to hold up a production for a kid having a tantrum. Successful kids are professionals in the same way successful adults are - maybe more so.
In all the auditions we went to, I never saw a “stage mother” type. I have seen mothers whose kids may not have wanted to go to a particular audition. If that becomes a habit, the problem quickly corrects itself, as the kid stops getting auditions.
I doubt a central part of the OP’s premise: that the child is talented enough to be discovered on the stage without any previous training, which already requires driven and dedicated parents. Granted, I know this mostly of athletic children - if you want your child to compete in gymnastics, training starts at age four, in a seriousness that kids that age just don’t have, so the parents force them (often with emotional pressure).
I would not force my child against his/her wishes to work in the music/ entertainment industry. It also wouldn’t work from a practical aspect. Unless the child loves singing/dancing whatever, they won’t do a good enough job.
In fact, even if my child was interested in the music industry, and thus had received singing training because they wish so, I would still try to discourage them by explaining the reality and hardship of being a rock star to them. (I would do the same with every other “glamour” job about which kids often have misconceptions - tell them the real facts).
I also don’t believe a producer would want to record only one album. He would want one album to see if it hits big, in which case, he would want the child for the whole deal - several albums, videos, tours, etc.
For the purposes of a hypothetical I can accept that the kid is really a fantastic singer and dancer despite having no serious interest in music or dance, but you’re right, in real life it’s unlikely. A good friend of mine is a fantastic singer, has been singing since she was young (started out in the church choir), and recently completed a Master’s degree in voice performance, but the record companies aren’t beating down her door yet. I might someday have a kid with a gift for singing, but she’s not going to be as good as or better than this friend of mine without years of practice and training.
Of course, being a pop star does not necessarily require that one be a particularly good singer. I’ve heard better singers that Britney Spears every time I’ve been to a karaoke bar. The combination of decent voice and hot body is more rare, and since the hypothetical child in the OP is described as being very good looking then I’d be concerned that the record company was less interested in the kid’s talent and more in his or her potential as the next big jailbait pinup. I definitely would not want my 14 year old marketed as a sex symbol. Britney Spears’s record company had her heavily made up and prancing around in a skimpy, lingerie-revealing schoolgirl costume when she was just 16 (see the “Baby One More Time” video), and look how well she turned out.
This is precisely what I was thinking of when I wrote the OP. My inability to write anything without some allusion to mythology probably obscured it. I blame that bitch Ishtar.
Note that I specified record deal. I could easily be wrong–I’m wrong frequently, 17 times since noon today by last count–but my impression is that the music business is a bit more of an evil grinder than acting.
Plenty of time for that once she’s an adult, thank you anyway.
"“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
I don’t know - they are different beasts. If a 10 year old kids gets rejected 90% of the time, she is doing really, really great. Usually you don’t tour if you are acting - though a friend of my daughter’s was in a show on a cruise ship - not as much fun as you might think. Another friend had a principal role in a Danny Stern movie, which shot in northern CA in the winter, standing in for summer, and included scenes with the kids getting dunked in cold river water. I think I’d take a week in hotels over that.
But I admit I didn’t really answer, If the kid didn’t really, really, want to do it, no way. If she did, I’d get the agent to write a contract with strict rules about hours, behavior, access by parents, and of course have a tutor, with hours off for school work. After the Twilight Zone movie fiasco parents are always allowed on the set, so no locked hotel rooms without my access. And we’d have a probation period, to see if it works.
Acting and music are similar in that they involve short periods of intense activity with long periods of down time. The down time part is the problem.
