I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea (wilwheaton.net)

People say the golden age of the internet has ended but I think ^^^ is proof that it’s just beginning.

At 11 I was operating construction machinery, I had to hide from the inspectors on some jobs but on others I could talk to them. State vs. Federal I think: the State guys could be bribed.

At 16 software I had written (bid estimation) was selling for $2k a seat to earthwork contractors all over North America.

Anything I got paid went right to the parents to pay off "debts" they considered I owed them. They kept this up until I stopped letting them. At 35, I wanted to marry my wife and start a family, when I told my parents about this they were so happy they'd be getting another slave they started planning all the uses they could put her to in front of me. I realized that this proposed behavior was just as unacceptable applied to me, as it would be to her.

My Dad died a few years later, I had to help wind up his businesses, which was eye opening: I was President of one company and Treasurer of another (I'd never agreed to do either job, hadn't been aware of the one company at all). There were emails about how they could hide hundreds of thousands of dollars from me, contemporaneous with times when I had sold belongings and stretched my credit to keep "our" business running.

I'm (obviously) still dealing with all that. My child gets told to pursue self determination and never do business with blood relations.

Hollywood is the land of depravity and abuse. It's no place for children.

"Darkwing Duck shoots a grappling hook up the Eiffel Tower and gets pulled up to the observation deck"

and then the entire sequence will be generated in near realtime.

Then they'll start doing it with actors. Movie studios will create composite actors with composite voices to star in films which, from a visual standpoint, are about 80% generated by AI.

Staggering.

It's reinforced by a mirror blog post, written by his wife: https://www.annewheaton.com/the-other-side-of-depression/

> What is a healthy amount of pushing vs too much?

There is no healthy amount of pushing, period. If you stop applying pressure, children will find their own thing, and that’s the best outcome for them. Just make sure they know the possibilities of what they could do.

What would you have liked to do instead of learning piano? Did you need pressure from your parents to have those ideas?

I asked my parents for a keyboard. My mother said that I‘d need to learn piano first - so I agreed to take lessons instead. 8 years later, I gave up on piano lessons, with no keyboard in sight. Haven’t touched the piano since. I wonder what would’ve happened if they had just bought me that cheap keyboard instead.

I feel this way about music, zero education as a kid, started late as an adult, but feel I'll never catch up.

Though there's no way of knowing whether I'd have felt the same as a kid, or pushed back against it at the time.

I think the best way to decide what’s too much is to think about whether or not the child will, 20 years from now, write a blog post shaming and exposing their abuse inflicted upon them.

Asian culture simply adopted American and English culture in this regard. In the United States circa 1950s and 1960s it was very common for children to be taking piano lessons, and owning a piano was also relatively common. Both the lessons and the piano itself were important status symbols, and having both were considered markers of being middle-class. My mother's side was middle-class Irish-Catholic and she and all her siblings had to take lessons; they also grew up with a piano in the home. By contrast, my fathers side was working-class Polish-German and both pianos and piano lessons were well out of reach--the family cleaned the church on weekends for reduced Catholic school tuition. But I think all 4 of my paternal aunts did have pianos in their homes as adults. So most of my cousins (all maternal, most paternal) grew up with pianos in their homes, though their parents were much less strict about lessons.

My wife, who grew up in Malaysia, had the same experience as my mother. All of her grandparents were already middle-class (shop owners, professionals, etc), but old-world Chinese middle-class where status markers were making donations to religious and fraternal organizations or studying calligraphy. It was her parents generation that bought pianos and forced the kids to take lessons. And doing the same was important for both she and her brother. (I also appreciate the desire, it's just less of a parental priority for me.)

The practice may be a little stickier in Asian culture (both in Asia and Asian diaspora) as the piano slotted into similar, pre-existing social customs which may remain more durable, but I think the overall arc is basically the same, just shifted up one or two generations.

When I was very young I had piano lessons. My memories are only dim, but I think I enjoyed them. I also gave them up quite quickly. I distinctly remember trying to play a little tune and messing it up again and again. I didn't have the skills to deal with my frustration and anger. I didn't have the perseverance. Perhaps if someone had helped me through this I could have persisted, or perhaps it was just too early for me and I needed some more life experience before I could handle it.

When it comes down to it I think kids need lots of opportunities to try many things, as well as the experience of "going deep" on one thing. It doesn't really matter if it's dance, music, art, programming, languages or whatever. There's always the meta-game of skill acquisition going on. Learning that time, effort, consistent practice, thoughtful reflection are useful is the real goal.

It's also worth remembering that children are unique people with unique personalities. They will all have different challenges and respond to the world around them in different ways.

Funnily enough, every friend brought up "working class", who had no access to music / sport etc is envious of my forced violin lessons, choir practice and sports after school all year round.

The important thing is to encourage but listen to them. And to make it clear that they can just do it for fun.

I do agree that one should stop making children do things once it's become obvious that they don't enjoy it. 12 years is too long.

All in all, I guess there is no one good way of raising a kid.

The idea, is that I think that for certain things like music, it only really become enjoyable once one has developed a certain amount of competence. So 3 years mean having enough basics so that our son can decide if he likes it or not.

I learned Japanese as an adult. I know at least 3 Americans of Japanese descent angry at themselves for complaining to their parents to let them stop extra curricular Japanese classes as children. One was so angry I can't speak an Japanese around him because it just triggers his self loathing over this issue.

I don't have an answer. My dad's side of the family were all professional musicians (though they had other jobs too). My dad never pushed me to play and basically said if I wanted to learn I'd have to push for lessons. Of course I was a kid and just wanted to play video games. I personally wish (or think I wish) they had pushed a little more.

This was my entire childhood. If I wasn’t constantly overachieving, there were threats of having me institutionalised (I never really understood the threat, given that I was already being raised at boarding school, how much worse could an asylum be?), actual privations (I came second in the year in some exams once because I had to do them from bed with bronchitis, and went home at the end of term to find my bedroom had been turned into a parlour), and the general gaslighting (Mr Hart is a very nice man, he would never do that (he is now in prison)) of childhood.

It was my mother, mainly, trying to make her own stunted and valueless life feel worthwhile. I forgive her, for she wasn’t much more than a child herself, and came from a small and terror-ridden world in the poverty of the decaying Scottish industrial heartland. She knew not what she did. She married a yuppie, an 80’s guy of the 70’s, and clambered onwards and upwards, putting on airs and graces you’d never think came from a girl who grew up in a trailer on a marsh next to a military base.

I recall testing this hypothesis, that it was about her, not me, aged 11, when I was Shanghai’d into doing a production with the Chicago lyric - she’d been pimping me out as a boy soprano with an English accent in Chicagoland, and crap did it sell. I decided to not tell her. Kept it completely under wraps while I rehearsed, told her I was throwing rocks at birds or something to explain the time, which was far more believable. Show rolls around. She’s there, at the premiere, because she has to be seen at all of this stuff, always. She was FURIOUS - I don’t remember a more severe beating from my father - that I had shamed her in such a way, that I had let her down so richly. The thing she was upset about, of course, is that I’d made it rather hard for her to take the credit, as she’d had literally zero involvement and everyone knew it.

We left Chicago a few months on, and I was removed from the school that had helped me go behind her back.

I feel for Wil. It’s a tough thing to live with, the anger, the absolute fucking outrage at what was done to you, balanced with the fact that whether you like it or not you still love these damaged shitheads, and your seemingly never ending quest for understanding why.

I understood, only in my late 30’s, the past few years, that none of it was my fault. I still haven’t entirely internalised that, maybe never will, but finding peace with my mother as just being the not terribly worldly or foresightful person that she is. I pity her hollowed out little life of gin and gardeners, but if it’s her crowning achievement, so be it, that’s her life to ruin. I got mine, mostly, back.

I was forced to play piano for 10 years and to do all those recitals and music theory tests. I could never wiggle myself out of it because of all the guilt-tripping. So of course, I went to college and promptly dropped all of it.

And unexpectedly, nearly a decade later, this pandemic thing happened, I returned to piano, recently bought a digital piano, and found a teacher. I practice 1-2 hours every day. And a lot of those skills I thought I would have lost returned pretty quickly.

I have a lot of complicated emotions around this that I haven’t really quite figured out. But if I were to summarize them at their current stage, they’d be something like: (1) I am grateful that I was pushed to learn this instrument, (2) I realized I really disliked my childhood piano teacher, (3) my parents failed to recognize that for 10 years (as evidenced by never presenting the option of finding someone else), and (4) playing to inflate someone else’s ego is absolutely demotivating.

One of the unfortunate effects is that roughly 1/3rd of Mozart’s sonatas are unplayable because I have some bad memories associated with them. Fortunately, there’s plenty of music in the world that don’t trigger those feelings, and I am so glad that I didn’t play that much Chopin back then.

Maybe that might help? I’m not a parent, so consider these raw ideas that need some work to become parenting advice.

What about not at all? The only thing they need to be good, not even best, is the studies that will enable them to work. Just help them if they're falling behind. Os support them if they seem to have a passion for something in particular. But otherwise, let them have a life.

I think that's really hard to answer. I was in a sort of opposite situation as you were as a kid. My sister and I started piano lessons when I was 7 or 8 years old. They went on for a year and a half or so. Neither of us liked practicing. Our mom told us if we didn't practice, we wouldn't have lessons anymore. So... we didn't have lessons anymore. Today, I really wish I could play, and wish my parents had pushed us harder to stick with the lessons.

But I could very easily see it going the other way (if not for piano, than for something else), with my sister and I being forced to do something we hated. So yeah, really hard to figure out where that balance is.

In contrast, just a couple years later I started playing trumpet in school, and did stick with that, at least through college. I was quite good at it (not really to the point I could play professionally, but good enough to score well in local and regional amateur competitions). But it's kinda hard to play a loud brass instrument in apartment and condo buildings without making some angry neighbors. It's another reason why I wish I could play piano, since electric ones have volume controls and headphone jacks.

Of course, obviously taking piano lessons is a much much much much more minor thing than being forced to be a child star and contemplating suicide...

If you read other things written by Wil Wheaton, you'll find (according to his description) that his parents had a very perverse relationship with each other, and used him as a pawn in whatever twisted relationship games they were playing. Neither one actually cared about him as a person. There was no way he was going to come out of a situation like that un-scarred.

"Love covers a multitude of sins." Genuinely love your kids, and you won't go too far wrong.

EDIT: From TFA:

> It’s been clear for as long as I can remember that my mom and my dad don’t feel bad or anything about how much they hurt me, or how much their choices affected my life. My dad doesn’t care at all, and never did.

Don't be like those guys, and your children won't end up like Wil.

Most learning happens only through repeatition/practice. Get them comfortable with repeatition as early as possible and they will be fine.

Some friends and I had fairly negative experiences with childhood activities (for me sports, for them music). However, as we reflect on them as adults we are quite happy that we were pushed into uncomfortable scenarios and “forced” to learn life long skills. Indeed, some of my friends argue that they wish they were pushed a bit harder.

All that being said, the amount of “pushing” my friends and I experienced does not seem be irregular (like in the article). It does lead me to believe there is some “okay” amount of pushing. Does anyone have perspective on where they draw the line?

Yeah, he's 5 years older than me, but I remember watching that show and daydreaming about how cool it would be to live on the Enterprise and how I would be best friends with Wesley Crusher.

I know adults loved to rag on the character and (re-watching it as an adult) I can see where some of the criticism of how he was written comes from. But there were so many parts of that show that have not aged well, and the "token genius kid" is still one of the least annoying to me.

Plenty of children benefit from hard work with their families. When the relationships are toxic then that time becomes toxic probably along with the activity. When there's love, they may not do that thing forever, but they will not hate it like this.

With my children, I encourage exploration of their skills, desires, and I've started them on paths towards lifelong careers from youngish ages (12-13). Which includes learning skills and testing things out. But I keep a keen ear open to their desires and an eye on their actual aptitudes and try really hard to match them up with useful work that they will like long term. I also try not to push so hard I kill the joy in the exploration and discovery while trying to keep expectations up and providing on-level material for them to level up at their own pace.

Children want expectations. They need expectations. Just also fill their lives with love — especially active love involving your time and attention. So that they thoroughly know that they are loved and valued well above and beyond any of these things or activities, and it will generally go well.

David Epstein somewhat tackles this question in Range[0]. The issue come down to the type of 'learning environment' of the activity you are trying to get the kid into.

'Kind Learning Environments' are ones like golf or chess. The rules are clear, the feedback is rapid, standings are knowable, and the skills are uniform. For Kind learning environments, you just grind out the hours. Here you can use Gladwell's 10,000 hours to shine.

'Unkind Learning Environments' are ones like tennis, business, or poker. The rules are murky, the feedback is delayed, standings are at time undiscernible, and the skills are varied. For unkind learning environments, you have to graze on a lot of other disciplines to shine. Just grinding out the hours won't result in great results.

Epstein specifically uses Ospedale della Pietà as an example of greatness in music. He says that concert musicians use the learning styles of Kind environments, while jazz musicians use Unkind styles. A great union of the Kind and Unkind was in Venice at Ospedale della Pietà where female orphans became some of the best classical musicians in history due to the unique factors at the orphanage.

So the answer, per Epstein, to your question is that it depends (sorry!).

Do you want an orchestra music playing child? Use the Kind learning environment techniques of grinding away 10,000 hours.

Do you want a more jazz music playing child? Use the Unkind learning techniques of many other disciplines and getting through the 10,000 hours in fits and spurts.

Epstein's book goes into waaaay better detail than my comment's haphazard and poorly remembered accounting. If you're serious about the question, I'd buy it and read it.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ospedale_della_Piet%C3%A0

I also feel like he wants to inflict some of the pain he felt back on his parents, and embarrassing them on TV is the only way to make them take notice. I doubt it's going to do much to heal their relationship, but reading the post, I doubt either party is interested in a reconciliation.

And telling those kids that they're not alone.

I'm not saying it's always the case, but can we really appreciate parents that have so little empathy that they can't see how much suffering their egocentricity causes their own children?

Edit: typo

> the physical and psychological abuse she witnessed firsthand when she made me and my sister do The Curse.

So you comment isn't so much off topic, but is a bit tone deaf.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092809/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_by_Me_(film)

If they were real and he was exploited, why is it unfair to discuss it? Conversation helps - this is how we make progress.

He's carried this burden for a very long time. Maybe he thought it would go away. Then he seemed to have tried therapy. This appears to be just another attempt at getting over it; shouting it out to the world. And yes, he's "lucky" he became famous so this actually gets attention. For every successful child actor there have to be a hundred kids who didn't make it but weren't treated any better by their parents. So they're just some broke-ass adult sitting in a run-down bar drunkenly rambling about it.

This is absolutely, voraciously bad advice and no one should listen to it.

You are absolutely an adult when you're an adult. You can cut those people right out of your life and that is an adult and valid thing to do. You are under no obligations to forgive or have a relationship with them. If they only bring bad feelings into your life then don't let them in.

https://www.amazon.com/Singing-Songs-Meg-Tilly/dp/0929636627 is beautifully told story about growing up in an abusive family, written by a movie star. Who happens to be my sister. She eventually admitted that it was autobiographical. She didn't have to admit to anyone in the family though. It was hard not to put the real names back on the people I knew well.

Maturity for me meant understanding and having sympathy for why my parents acted as they did. To find in myself how it is possible to become the monsters that they were. Which I have to be able to see clearly to avoid carrying on the pattern.

But I do not forgive them. Nor could I ask for forgiveness if I had acted as they did.

i disagree that he would not be as well known now if it wasn't for his parents. are you trying to suggest that he should be thankful for that?

most child actors disappear into obscurity when they grow up. will managed to find his way, and that's entirely his own achivement.

of course without his parents he might not have chosen to be an actor at all, but he might have been happier and healthier. who cares how many people read his blog. that's not what defines his life.

I'm prepared to bet a bunch of people, some of whose comments you've just read, are gearing up to talk to their families about a similar experience they had, but they have no audience at all.

If his parents did not force him to become famous, he would not need to write this blog post...

One big difference is that Wil was robbed of his childhood and friends for acting, while a lot of the after school activities forced upon us were formative for childhood. Wil was actually working a real job, I just got piano lessons and had to practice almost every day.

Another big difference is that Wil's parents mostly acted in their own self interest, whereas most parents bussing their kids to after school activities mostly do it for the kid (for college admissions usually).

Obviously there is a wide spectrum, and there are exceptions (the original Tiger Mom probably crosses the line for example). However, I think saying in general that overzealous parents are the same as abusive parents downplays the abuse that Wil and others received.

How do you call this?

A very painful read, I hope Wil is better in his head and in his soul right now. I would personally ban all child acting going forward, as in, all of it: feature films, TV series, commercials etc. The potentials for abuse are just too big.

You can become good at anything with practice. The standards for a 7-year-old are very low, and the fact he became good at acting is probably because he was forced to do it so much.

I assume he'd rather have had a less traumatic childhood than be a millionaire.

Most people who believe this have grown up with either narcissistic parents, or just otherwise emotionally (not fiscally or materially, which neglected children often confuse misattribute as love and care) neglectful parents.

The narcissistic ones simply love to fill their children's heads about how self-sacrifical and hard parents they are, yada yada yada.

I strongly encourage anyone to read up on "good enough parenting" and narcissistic family dynamics, especially if you think you had an "overprotective" parent that couldn't respect boundaries.

Edit: here's some links to encourage research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_enough_parent

https://narcissistfamilyfiles.com/2020/03/15/12-unspoken-rul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_parent

Aside: there's growing research that supports narcissism (especially intergenerational narcissism) and narcissistic abuse has been on the increase, and that roughly 1 in 5 people have suffered from narcissistic abuse at least once in their life (check out Ramani Durvasula's book or literally pick any literature or research on narcissism)

In the end it's a "ignorance is a bliss". He's missing a significant part of his childhood. He did try to come up with a replacement for a few months during his studies but realised that he was simulating and overdoing it.

I've never seen him "let go" if you understand what I mean. I'd never tell him but seeing that is quite scary and I wouldn't want to exchange my freedom as a kid for all his money.

Also he's married to a person similar to him. They don't have kids.

They are a very boring couple but they try and we try to drag them along sometimes.

I've seen it fail more often than not fail. Maybe from the outside the person has a great life but on the inside they're not actually happy.

> It just feels weird hearing a millionaire, rather successful, badmouth his parents and throw a pity party because they made him do something he was good at as a child. The vast majority of people would likely trade their position for his, childhood be damned.

I'm not that sure. What good does it make to be millionaire if you're deeply unhappy? Of course, if someone is starving right now they might want to swap places, or if they're unhappy already they might as well be unhappy with more money. But I don't think that state is something people really want.

There's a difference between encouragement and support and forcing. Forcing is never good or healthy. It's always abuse, no matter the mental gymnastics involved we use self-rationalise traumatic childhoods.

It's no different from me forcong you right now to do something. Parents don't own their children. They can buy a doll if they want a doll.

Edit: also "great" mean little in this context, as it means different things to different people.

There's always someone with a worse life. I'd rather be homeless and hungry in America than live through the drought and famine that's hitting parts of Africa right now, or to have a roof over my head in the Chinese concentration camps.

Being rich and famous doesn't make you happy. I fact, I'd say the opposite is often true: Hollywood produces some of the most twisted, desperate, depressed and depraved people out there. Today, Wil Wheaton is in a position many of us dream to achieve, being famous and beloved by the masses and probably not having to worry about money for the rest of his life, but to get there, he had to survive a lot of trauma. Is all that money worth it watching some movie producers scratch up your sister's face as a child actor? What if the gamble hadn't paid off? His sister suffered through a similar life but I haven't heard much from her. Going through all that to have the glamorous life of... a massage therapist? No, thank you. You can learn to give massages without the parental neglect. Wil was lucky to get a successful career out of this but that was never certain.

Comments like yours often come off as envious to me. Some want the glamorous riches so bad they overlook the childhood trauma. Perhaps you've survived your own trauma, but "at least he got something out of it" is still a terrible take.

The only person really qualified to say whether or not it's great is the person themselves.