'Camp Rock' actor Alyson Stoner on the true cost of child stardom

NBC News

a day ago

Starting at the age of 7, Alyson Stoner's spunky dance moves, precocious acting chops and signature pigtails ensured a successful Hollywood run in movies like 'Camp Rock' and 'Cheaper By the Dozen.'
These days, however, Stoner is pulling back the curtain to reveal the hazards of child stardom.
'What I wish we would have known is that your overall longevity and holistic development are so much more critical than trying to capitalize off of an interest before you can even write in cursive,' Stoner tells TODAY.com. 'It's actually absurd.'
Stoner, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, is still working through the fallout of what they call ' the toddler-to-trainwreck industrial complex.' Their new memoir, ' Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything,' shares a heartbreaking account of family disfunction, disordered eating and mental health crises.
'I was riding the highs and just trying to meet the moment of a busy schedule every day,' Stoner says of their childhood. 'It's hard to take inventory when you're going 150 miles an hour.'
Today, Stoner finally has time to breathe ... and a mission to heal personal wounds and encourage reform in the entertainment industry.
Work it
One of Stoner's first career breaks was a small but standout role in Missy Elliott's 'Work It' in 2002. Stoner was one of several young dancers, but they stood out from the rest. The video led to 10-year-old Stoner teaching the dance to Ellen DeGeneres on the very first taping of her talk show.
As Stoner grew, so did their fame: a long-running relationship with the Disney Channel, a role as Channing Tatum's younger sister in 'Step Up,' and voiceover roles in shows like 'Phineas and Ferb.'
But at the same time, Stoner's perfectionistic people-pleasing behaviors increased their stress level to unsustainable heights. The academic schooling Stoner had been receiving didn't qualify for a college entrance, they were exercising too much and eating too little and a large sum of the money had been taken by their former business team.
At 17, Stoner checked into a rehab facility and changed the course of their life.
'The industry, by design, disrupts every single domain of development,' Stoner says with an emphatic nod.
'When you're at the beck and call of agents and managers in a highly competitive environment where scarcity drives this willingness to comply with whatever breadcrumb you can get, you end up losing consistency, structure, routine,' they explain. 'Without space to recover, it starts to tax and corrode the body.'
Why Hollywood is such a dangerous place for kids
Stoner says that a 'stage parent' is mistakenly seen as someone who is controlling and wants to live out their dreams through their children.
'In my experience, more often than not, I encountered well-meaning parents who genuinely were aiming to support their child's interests and even to protect them,' Stoner says. 'The absence of resources prevent families from understanding how to pursue this passion in a healthy and sustainable way.'
Stoner, who works as a mental health advocate, has created a toolkit to help families navigate tricky situations in the entertainment industry, and they were recently certified to be an on-set mental health coordinator for television and film.
They want to help parents see past 'the facade that we expertly curate in the media.' But it can be difficult to give a child actor a childhood.
'The moment that you commodify the talent and that legal teams, corporations, mass media, general public are involved, it takes on a much different life of its own,' Stoner says. 'It becomes an adult workplace with adult responsibilities. There are lots of areas of vulnerability for your young one to be taken advantage of, even if you're doing your absolute best to protect them.'
And what happens after a child star reaches the height of their fame? Well ... nothing.
'One of the tragic elements here is that after we extract from that child, they're discarded, and we move to the next child,' Stoner says. 'We forget that there's a real person who has to somehow figure out what to do after they've completed that early peak.'
A change of scene
Stoner says their mother 'went above and beyond to put forth her best effort to protect me, and the reality is the industry is such an indescribable, unrelatable environment for a young person to grow up, and there were no instructions.'
Despite everything Stoner went through, they say it's not impossible to navigate child stardom in a positive way.
'There's a world where some version of this, along with hopefully changes within the industry and at the policy level make it a healthier pursuit,' Stoner says.
Luckily, Stoner isn't alone in pushing for change in the industry. Other peers are speaking out in documentaries like ' Quiet on Set ' and ' Child Star.' Stoner appeared in the latter with 'Camp Rock' co-star Demi Lovato.
'I'm eager for more of my peers to come forward, and I recognize they can help tell the story, and I can help, hopefully accelerate the pace that some of these protections are are put into place,' Stoner says.