Latest news with #teenageexperience
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why Frances Anderson Stepped Away From Acting After Modern Family
Originally appeared on E! Online Frances Anderson was looking forward to a modern teenage experience. So when Modern Family ended after 11 seasons in 2020, the actress—who played Lily on the hit ABC sitcom—knew it was time to try life as a normal teenager after years on set. "I was homeschooled while filming Modern Family, which ended when I was 12," Frances told E! News' Francesca Amiker in an exclusive interview. "I decided to take time off from acting to go to school, be with kids my age, and find myself." And while the 18-year-old is currently focused on music—opting to go by her middle name instead of the birth name Aubrey Anderson-Emmons she used as a child star—she isn't ditching life in front of the camera forever. "I plan to act again," Frances noted, "but the break was exactly what I needed." But the break didn't exactly provide her with the most normal teenage years as her return to school coincided with the pandemic. More from E! Online Reba McEntire's Son Shares Emotional Tribute to Brother Brandon Blackstock After His Death Princess Anne Debuts New Hair Look for First Time in 50 Years in 75th Birthday Photo Bryan Kohberger Murders: Crime Scene Photos Released By Police "We wrapped the show, and two weeks later COVID hit,' she revealed. 'So I went from a major TV show to lockdown. Eventually, I enrolled in a public school with 4,000 students—very overwhelming! People recognized me, and it was a lot. I ended up switching schools and found a place that fit me better." Now, Frances is shifting back into the public eye, this time as a singer-songwriter, whose EP Drown released August 8. 'A lot of my music is inspired from stuff when I was younger, when I was a kid,' she explained. 'A lot about what my experiences were like in high school, and I hope that people find it relatable.' As for why she decided to release her music under a different name? For her it was really quite simple. "I wanted to switch it up and I wanted people to see a new side of me," Frances said. "And I wanted to create a space specifically just for music. And I'm so excited for everybody to hear the songs on the EP, and I'm so grateful.' For more of where the Modern Family cast is now, read on. Sarah Hyland as Haley DunphyAriel Winter as Alex DunphyNolan Gould as Luke DunphyAubrey Anderson-Emmons as Lily Tucker-PritchettRico Rodriguez as Manny DelgadoJeremy Maguire as Joe PritchettTy Burrell as Phil DunphyJulie Bowen as Claire DunphySofia Vergara as Gloria PritchettJesse Tyler Ferguson as Mitchell PritchettEric Stonestreet as Cam TuckerEd O'Neill as Jay PritchettReid Ewing as Dylan Marshall For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
31-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Worried about your child's screentime? Get a landline
Among the many useless but consoling facts I've hung on to at the expense of real knowledge is the telephone number of my best friend from high school. I can say it in my head – 612505 – and, like a combination lock, it throws open the door to a memory of me sitting on the stairs after school, yakking to the person I'd just said goodbye to on the bus. Given it's more than 30 years since I used that number, I have to assume it will stay with me – along with the lyrics to the Cadbury's Roses ad from 1983, the name of the fictional head teacher of Summer Bay High (Mr Fisher) and my own telephone number from that era (623492) – until the day I die. I hadn't given much thought to landlines or the teenage experience of sitting on them after school every day, until a recent piece in the Atlantic shared the results of a small, highly localised experiment: in Portland, Maine, a parent nervous of giving her 10-year-old child a smartphone took the eccentric step of reintroducing a landline, and then persuaded the parents of her child's friends to do the same. Before she knew it, between 15 and 20 families in the area had reinstalled landlines for their preteens in what the Atlantic called a 'retro bubble'. Charming scenes ensued, communications habits changed, and everyone learned a valuable lesson about the advantages of ancient technology. The funny thing about this is that unlike the brick phone, another answer to the puzzle of how to keep children off social media, the families of Portland discovered that the very thing that limits the landline – the fact it's attached to the wall – turned out to be one of its big attractions. Most families put the phone in a high-traffic area of the house, keeping their kid at least notionally in the mix rather than shut away in their room. This was a tactic popular in the early days of home computers, when parents would put the family's single, giant desktop on a table in the kitchen so the kid wasn't isolated or left alone with 'the internet', a healthy instinct that smartphones effectively killed. For the kids involved, pivoting to landlines entailed a conceptual leap as big as any they'd encountered: the amazing Russian roulette of having to pick up a ringing phone to discover who was on the other end; the mediation experience of having to say hello to a parent and ask politely to be put through to their child; the need to memorise a number; and the wildest thing of all, trying to remember that phoning a friend on a landline meant that, if they picked up, they could only possibly be in one place, so that shouting 'ARE YOU HOME?!' down the phone, as one young case study did, made no sense whatsoever (but was very funny). None of the families involved had an interest in reducing the contact their children had with their friends. But they were concerned with the issue of distraction – that kids speaking to each other on smartphones are often scrolling at the same time – and one of the reported findings was that the old-fashioned phones encouraged them to become 'better listeners'. For anyone who grew up getting home from school, changing out of their uniform and getting straight on the phone to carry on the conversation they'd broken off an hour earlier, this idea of extracting formal skills and takeaways from basic behaviours seems part of the broader parenting shift towards turning every last thing into an effing learning experience. On the other hand, I get it; the appeal of old phones is rooted in nostalgia but also in the idea that there is something wholesome about the relative transparency of landlines and returning to a way of doing things that, while it annoyed parents back in the day, didn't strike the fear of God into them. Pre-mobile phones, the main anxiety suffered by parents with kids who were forever on the phone was that they were going to 'run up the bill', 'tie up the line', or fritter their life away gossiping, all adorably quaint concerns. No one can groom or catfish a child via a hunk of plastic attached to the wall. What was the takeaway for us, who grew up on landlines? I guess if mobiles these days exert an enormous gravitational pull in our pockets, still some other order of magic existed around the old landlines. 'I'll get it!'; 'it's for me!'; redundant phrases now that, back then, spoke to the tiny thrill of election that came from receiving a call via the family phone – and like ghosts from the deep past, the lifelong dedication to memory of the numbers. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Vogue
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Sadie Sink on the Magic of Broadway, the Music That Soundtracked Her Coming of Age, and Her Tony-Nominated Role in John Proctor Is the Villain
One thing I was thinking a lot about in rehearsals was what my high school experience looked like. People would tell stories from school and stuff, and I didn't really have that. Mine looked a bit different. So, I always felt disconnected in that way. I went to high school for a little bit, but it was mostly done on set. That became useful for Shelby, because what really resonated was [the feeling of being a] teenager, but parts of you feel like you're already an adult. It became a useful tool for me, just relating it back to my own life. But no matter what a person's teenage experience was, this show encapsulates the rage and the catharsis, how no one will listen to you, and all those things that relate to girlhood, but also just womanhood in general. There was a New York Times article that came out the other day about the show, titled 'Why Women Are Leaving This Broadway Show in Tears.' What do you make of it all? It's beautiful and it's heartbreaking. There's audiences that, through this play, they're able to think about things that have happened in their own life that maybe live in that gray area that this play talks about a lot. And so, a lot of women connect to it. A lot of my friends that come to see it have very similar reactions, and it brings up important conversations. It makes people feel really seen. Obviously, we didn't plan the timing of it at all, but for this story to be told right now, under the same administration that Kimberly wrote [the play] under years ago… to be back in that spot is just really dark. It feels like such a gift that we get to do this right now. What do you hope people take away from seeing the show? I like it when people leave with rage, because I definitely feel a lot of that throughout the show. At the end, though, I hope that through Shelby and Raelynn [played by Amalia Yoo]—through their friendship—there's an appreciation for the connections that you have in your life, and that sense of hope that, with the people around you that you can lean on, you can change the world for a second. That's what these girls do. They change the world around them for the length of a song.
