Child Modeling and Why It's Probably Not for Me (or My Kids)
The first thing you need to know about child modeling is that money can’t be your motivation. When a friend of mine booked an amazing family modeling gig (they were flown out to an all-expense paid trip to Aspen worth thousands of dollars and compensated monetarily as much), I became very interested.
Getting my whole family involved in modeling wasn’t a viable option with my husband’s demanding work schedule, but child modeling seemed definitely doable. I thought college fund – and more, I won’t lie. So I got the agent’s contact info my friend used and turned in pictures of my two daughters, 4 and 2. But child modeling seldom goes this way, I would learn. Read on for my experience and maybe some parenting tips that will help you decide if it's for you and your kids.
In the coming weeks, the agent forwarded roughly four auditions, none of which were nearly as lucrative, and all of them strewn all over town. Some were as far away as an hour and a half drive without traffic. Even with a pretty flexible schedule, I couldn’t make some of the auditions because of the short notice and awkward scheduling times like 7am appointments.
The one audition we could make paid $800 for a full-day shoot. Broken up by the hour, we were looking at $100 an hour, maybe. I calculated the tax and the cut the agency would take in my head. Less motivated now, I decided to try it out anyway with a who-knows-where-it-might-lead mentality. And off we went on our first (and probably last) audition.
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The audition was held at a local hotel. I parked inside the hotel parking lot (which they didn’t validate) and was confronted with the task of waking up a tired toddler who had managed to fall asleep on the short drive over. The audition happened to fall during her naptime so she was undoubtedly cranky when I woke her up, but concerns of her unpleasant mood was at least initially trumped by her hair! What a mess. I hurried my girls up to the audition floor and tidied up my youngest daughter’s hair as best as I could while she squirmed and whined, and my older daughter ran up and down the halls. This wouldn’t have been so stressful if all of the other children weren’t seated in their seats so demurely.
We signed some papers at the registration desk. Even though my agent told me I didn’t need head shots, I began to feel like an unprepared student about to take an exam – at a new school. Everyone else had them.
What’s more, all of the other parents seemed to know each other. It soon occurred to me that they had done this before. They probably do this all the time, I thought. With portfolios in their hands, they seemed to breathe a more relaxed air and spoke in audition vernacular. “He had a slight wardrobe malfunction in there,” one woman quipped while leaving her audition. I began to feel very out of place.
Forty minutes later, we were finally next in line. They ushered us in and we found ourselves standing in front of a panel of three people behind a desk, much like American Idol, with one cameraman off to the side. One of the men sitting behind the desk in a collared shirt asked the girls simple questions like, “How old are you?” and “What’s your name?” The giggling didn’t yet ensue but I could see it bubbling up in their faces.
They asked the girls to brush their teeth. No props were given. My excited daughters started to giggle, one chuckle igniting another until they could do nothing but look at each other and laugh. They had completely forgotten what they were asked to do. I tried to redirect their focus but to no avail. When the producer asked them to try again, they played out some motions that looked more like karate moves than routine bedtime habits. After a couple of strokes, or punches really, my younger daughter grabbed my legs.
Next, my daughters were asked to pretend to sleep. Maybe this part of the audition would have gone better if they fell asleep easier in real life. But true to reality, they kept popping their eyes open and asking for mom and dad.
When the audition was over, I hugged my girls for a job well done. But I knew they did not get the gig. Child modeling takes much more than the biased gaze of an adoring parent, I realized.
Not getting the gig wasn’t disappointing for me because I wouldn’t have chosen them either. But I began to wonder how I might feel if my kids weren’t chosen after what I thought was a great audition. I might have phoned in an angry PTA-esque complaint to the company!
The experience was enough for me to realize that child modeling probably wasn’t for us. Not only does it take a certain kind of personality and temperament for a child to make it in this business, but it also wasn’t for me as the parent. Child modeling can’t be thought of as a business and that’s precisely how I approached it. It has to be a hobby or something the girls and I both enjoyed. And while it's not like we did not enjoy the experience (gauging by their fits of laughter), I know we could have had a more enjoyable time somewhere else on a Sunday afternoon! Think the beach, a museum or even the supermarket to be quite honest!
