For years, Christy Carlson Romano has used her platform to expose the pitfalls of Hollywood. Now, in the wake of Hayden Panettiere’s death, the former child star is calling for stronger safeguards to protect young actors from the lasting consequences of growing up in the spotlight.
In a new op-ed for Elle, the Disney alum — who starred on “Even Stevens” from 2000 to 2003 as a young teen — compared early fame to CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) while ripping Hollywood executives, networks and stage parents for failing to do more to protect young performers during their most formative years.
“The former child actor exists in a category the world does not know how to hold,” she wrote. “We are children when the public wants to feel protective of us, professionals when the industry wants to profit from us, and spoiled celebrities when we eventually show symptoms of having been both.”
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“Early fame is like CTE. Not as a diagnosis,” Romano continued. “As a way of thinking about repeated impact. We now have language for youth sports: protocols, helmets, parents worried about concussions. But we have almost no language for what happens when stress, scrutiny, rejection, adult pressure, and the collapse of privacy become the architecture of a childhood.”
“We put youth athletes in helmets and pads. We invented entire sciences around protecting them from long-term damage. Why can’t we pad the children paid to make the world smile?” she later added.
Romano argued that despite decades of stories about former child stars struggling later in life, young actors continue to be viewed as fortunate exceptions rather than children performing demanding professional work.
“Young performers are still treated as exceptions. Lucky exceptions. Cute exceptions. Talented exceptions,” she said. “Exceptions whose labor powers one of the most profitable storytelling machines in the world, while their mental needs are treated as inconvenient or irrelevant. Social work be damned.”
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Romano said “notoriety comes at a cost” in this day and age — even when the fame itself occurred decades earlier.
The actress, who rose to prominence as a teenager on the Disney Channel, acknowledged that she has been fortunate enough to receive meaningful help as an adult.
“Unlike some, I have had access to real help over the years. Help that addressed not only my thoughts but my nervous system,” Romano said. “I am not theorizing. I am describing what I finally found when I kept looking after decades of confusion.”
“Many former young performers do not have that kind of access or motivation for hard-won answers,” she added.
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Having experienced child stardom firsthand, Romano described a cycle in which responsibility for the welfare of young performers is repeatedly shifted among the adults and institutions surrounding them.
“Responsibility gets passed around. Stage parents blame producers, producers blame parents, networks blame culture, and culture then blames the child when the child becomes an adult in pain,” she said.
“By then, the young performer is no longer cute enough to protect. They are a cautionary tale. A headline. A person expected to be grateful for the extraordinary childhood that may have cost them an ordinary self for life.”
Romano said the public often sees the consequences years later, rather than the circumstances that may have contributed to them.
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“This is human and relatable in that the world always sees trauma after the fact,” she said. “It sees the adult unraveling, not the child adapting. It demands the scandal, not change from the system. It sees the addiction, not the architecture or the years when intervention could have mattered.”
Romano’s thoughts carry added weight in the wake of Panettiere’s sudden death, which remains under investigation.
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Panettiere was found dead inside a Greenville, South Carolina, residence on Sunday.
Preliminary autopsy results found no signs of trauma that contributed to her death, Fox News Digital confirmed.
“First responders and Emergency Medical Services arrived on scene and located a female in cardiac arrest,” the Greenville County Coroner’s Office said in a statement. “EMS personnel initiated advanced cardiac life support measures; however, resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful, and the individual was pronounced deceased at 2:32 PM.”
The Greenville County Coroner’s Office and the Greenville City Police Department launched parallel investigations into her death.
“At autopsy no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to the death,” the coroner’s statement continued. “The cause and manner of death remain pending further investigation and the completion of additional studies.
“This investigation remains active and ongoing. No further details are available for release at this time.”
Romano reflected on Panettiere’s death through the lens of her own experiences as both a former child star and a mother.
“I am thinking of Hayden, her daughter, the people who loved her in real life — not as a headline, not as a symbol,” Romano said. “I am thinking of my own daughter still upstairs, still crawling into my bed afraid of the dark, and how badly I want her to grow up in a world where children are not asked to become consumable before they become whole.”
“We need to stop calling the truth bitterness just because it interrupts nostalgia,” she said. “And we need to stop assuming former child performers are fine because they look pretty, sound grateful, book a job, and smile on cue.”
“Some of them are not unscathed,” Romano concluded. “Some of them are simply still performing.”
