Ariel Winter wants to be an adult.
The 14-year-old actress best known as Alex in Modern Family is asking for legal emancipation from her mother, Chris Workman. She alleges that her mother has physically and emotionally abused her for years. Workman argues that she’s never been abusive; Winter’s upset (Workman says) because Workman caught the girl and her 18-year-old boyfriend “engaging in behavior that I feel my daughter is too young mentally and physically to understand,” according to celebuzz.com. Winter wants the freedom (her mom says) to do whatever she wants with her boyfriend without parental interference.
I don’t want to wade into this sordid, she-said, she-said tabloid tale. But I do want to use it as a catalyst to talk about something that really does impact many of us: good parenting.
In the wake of the Ariel Winter story, Fox News published a pretty interesting article on other child actors who had sought, and received, emancipation from their parents. The litany is pretty sobering.
Corey Feldman, famous for his parts in Stand By Me and The Lost Boys, was legally emancipated when he was 15 years old. Two years later, he got married (which culminated in a divorce shortly thereafter). A year after that, he was arrested for drug possession. It sounds as though he’s on more stable footing now, if the tabloids can be trusted. But it took a while.
Macaulay Culkin, the cute kid from Home Alone, was emancipated at 14. He, too, got married when he was 17, and separated two years later. He, too, was busted for drug possession. And despite his denials, rumors persist that he’s still struggling with drug addiction.
Edward Furlong, the kid from Terminator 2, is a pretty sad story as well. Winning emancipation when he was 16, Furlong has struggled ever since. “Furlong’s life since has featured substance abuse, legal problems, and a restraining order by his ex-wife Rachael Bella,” according to the Fox News piece. “In 2010, the actor was arrested and jailed for violating his probation. Last year, he told a judge that he was ‘completely broke’ and unable to pay child support.”
And even when emancipation “works,” it’s a struggle. Melissa Francis, who played Cassandra Cooper Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie, won emancipation from her mother when she was 15. And in her book, Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter, we see how difficult it is for it to be truly grown up at that young age. She writes:
I didn't have a driver's license, how would I get to school? I wasn't organized enough at 15 to pay the rent, manage my schedule, go on auditions, work and take care of my basic needs. It didn't seem possible to break free. But I realized if I was going to seize the reins from my controlling stage mother, I had to be able to take charge of my life.
All of these emancipation stories (possibly excepting, for the moment, Ariel Winter’s) feature the thread of the same sort of story: The failure of the parenting process somewhere along the line. These kids were, presumably, granted emancipation because their parents weren’t great guardians of their children or of their futures. But emancipation was hardly an ideal solution. Cut loose without a good, adult role model—perhaps without ever having had one—many of these kids might not have truly understood the responsibilities that come with adulthood.
I don’t write this to demean or cast judgments on anyone, be they parent or child, in Hollywood or not. Parenting is, unquestionably, hard, hard work—and sometimes even with the best of parents, kids can rebel and go astray.
But for me, it just reinforces the weighty responsibility we have to our kids—to not just care for them as best as we’re able when they’re children, but prepare them for the day when they become adults themselves.
It’s tricky, I know. It requires a balance of good rules and boundless grace, all infused with the relentless guidance of God.
I don’t know what sort of parenting Ariel Winter has grown up with. But I do hope that she has some role models in her life that she can emulate and turn to for advice—adults who are not her 18-year-old boyfriend.
Recent Comments