I Wonder How Being The Child of a Celebrity Feels
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Culture, Relationships, Society, World, Parenting

I Wonder How Being The Child of a Celebrity Feels

I would hate to have my kids feel that kind of pressure when I have them.

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

I think every kid, at some point, envies the kids of celebrities. They’re rich, famous, and probably can get anything they want.

It took me until I was an adult to realize that the life of being in the spotlight, all the time, constantly overshadowed by the accomplishments of a parent, might be very suffocating. Like anything, it probably has its pros and cons, and as I’ve gotten older, the more I realized that the excessive attention and the inability to live a normal life is not as ideal as I thought it was. And just because your parent was a celebrity doesn’t mean you’re rich.

Fortunately, an anonymous user on Quora has already answered the question as to what it’s like to be a celebrity’s child. As a child of a writer father, daughter of a famous talk show host, and niece of a famous actress, she described the many pros and many cons of being a celebrity’s child.

Some of the pros included being surrounded by creative people and being able to learn a lot. She met a lot of famous people and it became the norm, and even had teachers who were mean and authoritarian towards the kids become much less mean when they learned who her father was. People, in general, tried to help her more and be nicer to her, but she also felt like some people would try to avoid her to stay out of trouble as well as to not be perceived as manipulative.

However, the Quora user would try to give a balanced tone as to the pros and cons but spoke a lot more to the cons.

She would say that in some ways, it became like a prison, especially when her father became an alcoholic after her grandmother died. Sometimes, her father would be aggressive and get drunk a couple of days a week, but never when he had an interview.

Nobody outside the family and circle of friends knew.

No one could talk about it either because they didn’t want to disappoint other people’s perception of her father.

“They had an image about my father, they loved him, and I was afraid if they heard about his mistakes this would change,” she wrote. “So I grew up not sharing much about my life. I will turn 30 this year and it’s still the same.”

She also talked about never having privacy, even in very sensitive life moments like her father’s funeral. She wanted to escape, but couldn’t do it much. Like the child of a pastor, she also constantly felt a lot of pressure to behave well and not get into trouble to not reflect poorly on her parents. If she was caught doing something wrong, everyone would know who she was.

Everyone also assumed that she was rich, which she was not. Because of her family’s social circle, people wanted to date her and become friends with her.

When she got older, she became a screenwriter and acknowledged that her father and aunt’s names helped her get job interviews. Many people regard her as successful simply because of who her father was. She also missed some jobs because the producer didn’t want people to think nepotism to be involved. In the end, she concluded:

“Having a celebrity parent has its pros and cons, just like everything else. In the end, though, my father is my father, my aunt is my aunt to me, just like how everyone sees their family. Not two celebrities.”

The user’s experience is raw and very vulnerable to me, and although she says there are both pros and cons, the length of her cons section was vastly longer than the length of her pros. There is a dark side to fame, and it is the children of famous people that suffer especially.

“When your parents are the ones who are famous, though, it can be a tough act to follow,” says Mary Loftus in Psychology Today.

A dark story of a son who tried to follow in his father’s footsteps was Robert Frost’s son, Carol Frost, who killed himself in the years following when his mother died. Of course, a lot of factors led to Carol Frost’s suicide, including his wife undergoing surgery in the hospital, hearing voices in his head, but one factor strikes out to me most:

Carol Frost wanted to be a poet, and a successful one. But with every step, he was comparing himself to his father, Robert Frost, who was the most popular and most famous poet in America. Very few people, even Robert Frost’s son, could live up to his standard. Frost himself would wonder to his friend, Louis Untermeyer, he should have pushed him to do something else with his life like work with horses and children, which were Carol’s passions.

No, not every child of a famous person dies by suicide, and very few do. But they all share in common that they have a lot of pressure to act and behave well, much more so than a pastor’s kid. Especially if you’re doing what your famous parent did, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be LeBron James or Michael Jordan’s sons, like Bronny James, Marcus Jordan, and Jeffrey Jordan, and feel so much pressure live up to your father’s legacy.

Of course, there are pros and cons of anything, but I would hate to have my kids feel that kind of pressure when I have them.

Maybe I don’t know what being the child of a celebrity feels like. But I think it’s important to remember we’re all human beings at the end of the day, and the children of celebrities, having the perks of fame, but also the lack of privacy and spotlight that accompanies famous parents, are humans too who have a lot of the same problems we do.