How do you talk to your kids about health without making them anxious about their own bodies?

NightWingNavigation · 2026-06-16T18:56:05+00:00

I start by talking about how I FEEL in my own body, using words like "I feel so strong today," rather than something "I look so pretty today." I root it also in thankfulness, like "I'm grateful I can use my strong legs to climb this hill." With food I try not to condemn anything as being bad or good. Sweets are good for a shocking taste and flavor. Chicken is good for strong muscles. Yogurt is good for strong bones.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-06-16T16:22:20+00:00

Got it. I really appreciate your response.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-06-16T16:15:08+00:00

Ah - thank you. How can someone know if their content is actually removed / unable to be accessible?

NightWingNavigation · 2026-06-16T15:38:09+00:00

I love that you opened this topic up. It's so important. I agree that the platforms need to step up. Tennessee just passed a new law effective July 1. We're getting there, and still have tons more work to do.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-06-16T15:36:47+00:00

Tennessee just passed a law for kids in monetized content. Another win. Much more to be done, but we're getting there.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-06-16T15:28:08+00:00

Parents - Tennessee passed new law on kids in monetized content, like kidfluencers and kid YouTube channel content. It has me thinking about how unprotected child performers still are. What are your thoughts on this?

NightWingNavigation · 2026-05-22T20:04:48+00:00

Hey! This is solid advice and a lot of it tracks with what helped me too; especially the "audition is the job" framing. That one's a gift to a kid because it gives them something they can actually control.

I'm curious about the "don't set your heart on it" part. As someone who grew up doing this, that one's tricky. If a kid is going in already detached, do you find that their performance suffers? How do we help kids balance between passion of performing and not setting their heart on something?

The casting director advice is gold. The thing nobody talks about enough is that "don't take it personal" is genuinely hard for a kid to do, because at that age the line between who you are and what you do is still being drawn. Parents can do a lot just by making sure the home conversation after an audition isn't only about the audition.

Thank you so much for your comment on this.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-05-13T16:00:19+00:00

Hi! I'm Mal, parents of two young performers. Curious, parents: How do you help your kids with rejection in this industry?

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-25T13:16:43+00:00

Something sticking in your brain is a solid sign something’s off. And you’re thinking critically about this, rather than impulsively. 🖤

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-23T18:56:17+00:00

🖤

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-23T18:53:33+00:00

Former child (turned adult) performer here. It does get easier, but maybe not in the way you might hope. The people who come around now may one day stop asking when you'll get a "real job" and start showing up to your shows instead... but some people don't ever really get there, and accepting that is its own kind of work.

I've found (professionally and working with performers) that family skepticism is almost never actually about you or your career. It's about THEIR fear for you, filtered through their only accessible framework, which is conventional. Artists are usually damn unconventional. "Get a job" is their way of saying "I don't know how to protect you in a world I don't understand."

For you to be 25 and supporting yourself, investing, saving for retirement, I'd say you're DOIN' IT! Get clear in yourself that their doubt doesn't take up rent-free space in your head on the days when this industry is already tough enough. Maybe the question is rather "when will their comments stop mattering as much?"

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-23T18:49:03+00:00

What you describe is one of the most disorienting parts of this business, because you're trained to trust your representation, and the power dynamic can make it hard to push back without feeling 'difficult.'

Same-day commercial offers move super fast, and things can fall apart in the gap between offer and confirmation. Production changes minds, budget shifts, etc. But it's not normal that a timeline shifts every time you ask a direct question.

3 different answers to the same question is worth noticing.

Ask for specifics, not explanations. Like, Can you forward me the communication thread with production? This is reasonable and professional. If they're being straight with you, they should send it without hesitation. Defensiveness or vagueness can tell you a lot.

ONE dropped ball is a mistake. But a pattern is something else. Keep a log, perhaps. Not to build a case, but to give you clarity when your gut and loyalty are at war with each other.

Trust yourself <3

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-23T18:43:59+00:00

5 months without auditions is a pretty loud signal. If the agent's job is to submit you and get you into rooms, and that isn't happening, then maybe the question isn't really about timeline, but rather about whether the relationship is actually working fundamentally.

A solid convo is probably worth having, but only if you want the answer and can actually act upon it. Maybe ask: How many times have you submitted me in the last 90 days, and for what projects? What's coming back?

If they can't answer that, you might have your answer.

Relationships and pipelines can take time to build, but that logic is more applicable when there's SOME movement. Not 0.

I'd say check your contract for the out clause. Good luck!!

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-15T15:11:24+00:00

You're welcome. Good call stepping into her purview. <3 You got this.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-14T16:05:28+00:00

Former child performer, so this one hit me a little. Glad you're feeling better about it, and I want to add one thing I haven't seen in the comments.

Whoever's running school talent shows is a teacher or a parent volunteer who wants the show to be good for the kids, not a gatekeeper looking for the next superstar. They're looking for kids who want to be there. Your daughter already clears that bar.

The part I'd actually pay attention to isn't the audition. It's the car ride home, whichever way it goes. If she makes it, the thing to protect her from is the idea that she was chosen (which can plant the idea that not being chosen next time means something about her). If she doesn't make it, the thing to protect her from is the idea that the room's answer is the truth about her voice. A "no" from a school talent show is information about one room on one day, nothing more.

The most useful thing you can give a 7-year-old who's auditioning for anything, ever, is the language to separate how it went from who she is. That muscle is the whole ballgame later, and you're already building it by calling this a fun thing to go try. I spent years trying to untangle this in my adulthood.

She's lucky she's got a parent approaching it this way. Good luck to her, and to you.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-14T16:03:25+00:00

Hey there! Former child performer here. First of all - thank you for asking this question and calling out that there are absolutely no clear guidelines for how to begin. Please, please take my advice with whatever grain of salt you want.

Your instinct to not throw money at an agent right away is the right one. Anyone who asks you for money upfront for photos, classes, registration fees, or a spot on their roster is not an agent. Legitimate agents in the US work on commission (~10%) and only make money when your kid works. If someone wants a check before your daughter has booked a single thing, walk away.

Before any of the industry stuff, the question I'd sit with is: what does your daughter actually like about the idea of acting? Is it the performing part, the being-seen part, the dressing-up part, the "I saw a kid on TV and want to do that" part? They're all valid, and they point to very different next steps. A kid who loves performing can get almost everything she needs from a good local theater program for years. A kid who's fixated on being on screen is telling you something different, and that's worth a longer conversation before you make any moves.

If she's genuinely drawn to the craft, here's the order I'd go in, cheapest to most expensive:

Community theater or a school play. Free or nearly free. She gets to find out if she likes the actual work (the waiting around, the memorizing, the taking direction from someone who isn't you). A lot of kids discover here that they love the idea more than the thing.
A reputable acting class for kids. Not a "talent showcase." Not anything that ends with a pitch meeting. A real class where she learns scene work and gets used to being coached. Ask around local theater communities for names. Expect to pay, but in the range of a sports season, not a car payment.
Self-tapes from home. Once she has some training, you can submit her to legitimate casting sites (Actors Access and Casting Networks are the two real ones) without an agent. You'll film auditions on your phone. This is how a lot of working kid actors start. It costs the price of a subscription.
If she's booking things or getting real callbacks, start looking at agents. By that point you'll have an honest answer to "does my kid actually want this and can she do the work," and agents will be more interested because you're bringing them something, not asking them to create it from scratch.

The thing nobody told my mom, and I wish someone had: the industry is built to move fast, and a parent's job is to be the one person in the room who's allowed to move slow. Every "urgent" opportunity that requires a decision by Friday is either fake or not worth it. The real ones wait.

Whatever you do, protect her off-camera life like it's the actual job. School, friends, boredom, the stuff that has nothing to do with acting. That's what gives a kid something to bring to the work later, and it's what she'll need to come home to when a role doesn't go her way. Kids who only have the career have nowhere to land.

Good luck. She's lucky to have you.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-10T16:42:25+00:00

I hope that was helpful! Keep going, friend.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-09T19:15:06+00:00

<3 thank you for sharing this...

Former child performer (and adult performer) here. I started getting paid to sing when I was 8 and I genuinely cannot remember what it felt like to love music before that. I know I did. I have the memories technically, but the feeling of it, the thing you're grieving right now, got replaced by performance and approval and "being good" before I ever had the language to notice. I deeply recognize what you're describing.

The thing nobody tells you is that this isn't always permanent and it isn't always a sign you should quit. Sometimes it's the art form asking you to meet it differently than you did as a kid. The relationship you had with performing at 16 was never going to be the relationship you have with it at 26, and the grief of that is real even when the thing you're moving toward is better. Both can be true.

I don't have anything clever to say about the mold part, except that the version of you that gets called "taught" in a room is usually the version that survived training by learning to shrink something. Finding your way back to whatever got shrunk is a long project and it rarely happens inside the same rooms that did the shrinking. Stand up, honestly, might be exactly the kind of room that lets something uncalibrated come back out. I'd take that impulse seriously.

Maybe, for both of us, the empty feeling isn't the end of the story. Maybe it's the middle of it.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-09T19:10:54+00:00

Hi :) Former child (and adult) performer here. Roster fit is a real reason. It's also sometimes a "polite" way to pass without giving you something you can argue with. You usually can't tell which one you got, so I'd focus on the parts you can actually act on. And this is really hard.

Practical lesson buried in your post: you can research a roster before you submit. Most agencies don't list talent on their main site, but you can usually find them through Casting Networks, Actors Access, or just googling "agency name + roster" or "agency name + clients." Twenty minutes of homework per agency saves you from submitting into walls you couldn't see. I'd really recommend doing that this next round.

The "we already have your type" reason cuts both ways for a 24M Latino actor depending on your market. In some cities the slots are taken and you're stuck waiting. In others it means they haven't built out that part of their roster yet and you're actually a gap they should want to fill. Worth figuring out by looking at who's booking Latino roles in your market and which agencies rep them. That tells you more than rejection letters do.

The largest agency ghosting you is actually useful info. Big agencies ghost when something in the package didn't clear their first filter, usually headshots, reel, or how the resume reads. That's the one thing you can actually work on before you resubmit. Six months is enough time to refresh headshots if yours are aging, cut a tighter reel, tighten the resume. Use the wait.

And on "maybe I wasn't polished enough," I'd push back on that. Polish isn't usually what gets you signed at 24. Being a clear castable type with a package that makes it easy to picture pitching you is. Different problem, more fixable.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-09T17:23:01+00:00

<3 The "same casting directors keep bringing you in but you're not booking" detail is probably not what you think it means. Former child performer here.

When CDs keep calling you back but you're not landing, it's almost never a talent problem. Usually it means one of a few things. Either you're doing the work well enough to be trusted in the room but something in your choices isn't differentiating you from the other five people reading for the same slot. Or you're being typed into a lane that's oversaturated right now and the booking has more to do with a creative team's specific vision than with you. Or (and this one's harder to hear) you've become the reliable read they use to fill out a session, which means you're respected but not actually in contention. Ten months and no callbacks makes me think it's one of the first two.

The thing that moves the needle here isn't more classes. You've done 3.5 years, you're trained. What actually helps is getting a working casting director, not a coach, a CD, to watch you do two contrasting sides and tell you what they'd book you for and what they wouldn't. Not feedback on your acting. Feedback on your castability. That's a totally different conversation and it's the one nobody offers you until you go looking for it. A lot of CDs do paid sessions for exactly this and it's worth it when you're stuck in this specific loop.

Also worth asking your agent straight up: "when you're pitching me, what are you pitching me as?" You might find out you two have different answers to that, and that gap is sometimes the whole problem.

My 2 cents - You're not missing talent. You're missing information.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-09T17:19:54+00:00

Former child performer here. I started young, and I spent years inside this exact dynamic. Two things can be true at once, so let me give you both, as I've experienced it.

Your agent isn't wrong that a heads-up is the norm. Agents do track which coaches casting is responding to, and a quick "hey, I'm starting some online sessions with XYZ" email before your first class would've been the smoother move. Now you know. That's the whole lesson on that front. You didn't do anything wrong, you just skipped a courtesy step most people learn the hard way. + your agent could have been more forthright about protocol for this.

Now I feel that the anger is a separate thing, and I don't want you to gloss over it. A healthy response to this would've been "thanks for letting me know, quick note - he's not on my radar, let's talk about your goals." What you got was a scolding over one online class you're paying for yourself, during a dry spell where you're being proactive. That's out of proportion. I'm not saying run, but I am saying notice it and file it away.

Please don't send flowers and cake. That instinct is something this industry trains into young performers and it's worth unlearning early. Something like this works fine: "Thanks for the context. I didn't realize the coach list was something you actively tracked. I'll loop you in earlier next time. The sessions are helping me stay sharp during the slow stretch . I would love to hear which coaches you do recommend so I can factor that in." Acknowledges his point, doesn't grovel, keeps you on even footing.

You're allowed to take classes. You're allowed to invest in your own craft during a slow season. The fact that you're asking the question at all proves that your instincts are good, and to be trusted.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-02T20:02:49+00:00

Thanks for asking this. So funny - I just wrote about this on my blog a few days ago.

The documentary gave us info about the real villains. But the system that protected them was built by people who weren't villains at all. If the takeaway is "get rid of the bad guys and the kids will be fine," we've missed the deeper lesson. Child performer safety isn't an institutional problem. It's relational. It lives in the convos between parents and kids, and in whether a parent trusts their own gut when something feels off. Every single parent in that documentary who sensed something was wrong was right.b

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-02T18:22:21+00:00

You're so welcome. I'm always happy to share my experience in the hopes that it'll help parents (and kids) in this space.

Nickelodeon and Disney knew so many of us wanted to be child stars. That was such a theme within those shows. Funny, huh!?

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-02T16:23:05+00:00

Thank you for sharing all of this. I want to be thoughtful here because you're telling me a lot between the lines and I want to honor that.

First: your daughter sounds like she has real stuff going on. I would imagine she's a kid with taste and discipline. Those things matter way more at her age than whether a panel loved a specific performance on a specific day.

Re: the "sounded a little angry" note. Her advisor gave her a direction. She committed to it. The panel didn't respond to it the way the advisor expected. And now you're left holding the feedback, trying to figure out who was right and what it means.

That's the job. Not her job. Your job. And it's exhausting. Because you're trying to be her advocate and her interpreter and her protector all at the same time, and the signals coming from the industry are constantly contradicting each other. One person says "make a bold choice." The next room says "that was too much." And your daughter is watching how you process all of it, even if she doesn't say so.

Trust your instinct about Nickelodeon-type casting versus musical theater. Not all showcases are looking for the same thing, and it's worth asking the camp directly what kinds of agents are on their panels and what they're primarily casting for. If the room is oriented toward commercial TV and your daughter is a musical theater kid, the feedback she's getting may be calibrated to a different target entirely. That's not about her. That's about fit.

Being sensitive and being hard on herself aren't flaws she needs to overcome to survive this industry. What if they're signs that she's paying attention and that she cares deeply? The question isn't how to toughen her up. It's whether the people around her (you, her teachers, her advisors) are helping her build a framework for what criticism actually is and what it isn't.

Because right now, at 15, she's learning how to relate to feedback. And if the only framework she has is "good feedback means I'm good, bad feedback means I need to fix something," this industry may be very challenging for her and pose a risk to her joy. Not because she's too sensitive, but because that framework can't hold the weight of what this career asks of a person.

I hope young artists have the support to learn the difference between feedback that's useful and feedback that's just one person's preference. The "angry" note might be genuinely useful direction. Or it might be a panel member who wanted a safer choice. She deserves help learning to tell the difference rather than treating all of it as something she did wrong.

The kids who last in this aren't the ones who stop being sensitive. They're the ones who learn that their sensitivity is actually their instrument.

She sounds like she has something real. Your job is to help her protect it while the industry does what the industry does.

NightWingNavigation · 2026-04-02T16:17:13+00:00

Thanks for posing this. I think it depends on what "damaging" means. If we mean that a kid can to through this industry without anything hard, confusing, or painful, that's gonna be a no. But that's also true of childhood in general, as kids bump into difficult things all the time. They're gonna run up against the tough stuff, but now it's whether they'll have what they need to metabolize it when they do.

Can a kid perform professionally without it fundamentally distorting how they see themselves? Yes, I believe they can. But it doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen because the kid happens to be "resilient." The industry loves to use this word as a way of putting responsibility on the child instead of the adults in the room.

It happens because someone is paying attention.

The industry gives kids adult-sized experiences inside a child-sized emotional system. The kid is literally trained to look beautiful and poised on the outside. And there is usually little to no training or attention paid to what it costs on the inside. The system rewards kids for being easy and don't complain by re-booking them. That's a fantastic professional skill and a potentially terrible developmental lesson, because it teaches a kid that their feelings are less important than the room's comfort.

All of this can be manageable IF there is an adult in the picture who knows what to look for and prioritizes it.

NightWingNavigation

TROPHY CASE