I saw a discussion on The View that was a bit disturbing, but not surprising to me. There is a new movie called Spring Breakers that is about to come out. The movie is rated R and tells the improbable and racy story of four friends who go on a spring break adventure filled with robbery, raunchy behavior and three way sex. From the previews it reminds me of Natural Born Killers but in a very lite format. It is definitely not a typical comedy filled spring break movie. What has given the movie attention, and what piqued the interest of The View panel, is that the stars of the movie are former Disney channel actors. The two most famous are Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens.

Some of the panel members from The View were concerned that one of the actresses did an interview and is on the cover of Seventeen magazine. The discussion centered on if an R rated movie should be promoted in a magazine geared, and I will use their words, to girls twelve to nineteen. It was made in passing that there is a difficulty in child stars making the transition from former roles as children to those of adults, but to me in glancing over that issue they were missing the major point of concern. Child actors have issues with growing up because the public, and this would be the adult public, have a hard time letting go of these actors being children.

To me the bigger issue is adults not accepting that their children are growing up and in many cases aren’t prepared for the world around them because parents what to protect their children too much. Just as a simple example, when the panel of The View talked about Seventeen magazine being a magazine for girls twelve to nineteen. That is a huge emotional range when you think about it. If a magazine is called Seventeen my assumption would be it would be for people in that age range, which for me would be sixteen, maybe fifteen to nineteen. To the panel on The View, they went all the way down to twelve, which is an age where kids are probably more connected to Barbie than to boys. Put in a less sexist light, someone fifteen or sixteen might be thinking about college plans or their first summer job, which wouldn’t be on the mind of a twelve or thirteen year old.

Doing a quick look, Selena Gomez is 20 years old, Vanessa Hudgens is 24, Ashely Benson is 23 and the least known Rachel Korine is 26. These are adult women. If you are going to fault them for acting younger in their new movie (frankly I don’t know what age their supposed to be in the film) then you would have to condemn the former cast of Beverly Hills 90210. They represented the youth of their time, splashed across endless magazines, many focused on young girls, but they were definitely not teenagers in real life. The actors in Spring Breakers aren’t obligated to take up cute kid roles for the public forever.

What I think would be a better discussion would be how hard it is for young actors to take on edgy roles without adults feeling their children are going to be effected. Young people are fickle fans and by the time a child actor has become an adult, their fan base has left them for a new star. That is the reason why many child actors have a hard time in Hollywood once their cuteness wears off. A few years ago, when Miley Cyrus began acting like an adult, parents lost their minds but her fan base wasn’t as powerful and large as it was in her Hanna Montana days. Yes, you had folks upset when on the Teen Choice Awards she sang her song with an ice cream truck with a pole, but I would wager a thirteen or fourteen year old saw the prop as an ice cream truck with a pole, not as a metaphor of a stripper pole.

Another possibility for discussion might have been why is it women are criticized for taking on adult roles while men aren’t? To take a cue from The View, women are shocked that adult women, who were former child stars, would do a movie with such ‘disturbing’ issue, but would the same thing be said if a male child actor did this? When Daniel Radcliff, yes cute little Harry Potter, did Equus in 2008 when he was seventeen years old, it didn’t get as much attention the actors from Spring Breakers are getting. You could say it was because Equus is a play and not a film, but I would think if you have a seventeen year old NUDE on stage, and that he was still appearing in a film geared for children, there might be a little more outcry. How about Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens co-star in the High School Musical series. Just last year he was in a film called The Paperboy, which cast him as a sexually repressed young man in the Deep South during the 60s. There was an infamous scene where Nicole Kidman peed on him. I guess since few people saw the movie there wasn’t much outcry.

I’m sure the biggest issue is the way the Disney female stars, and this seems to fall in the Disney camp, are marketed constantly as being wholesome and young when under contract with them, but once they leave the nest, it’s hard for the public to differentiate between the made up character and the real person. When Miley Cyrus turned eighteen Disney was still airing reruns of her show when she was fourteen. The Wizard of Waverly Place, the show Selena Gomez was on, just finished original programming last year, but again reruns are on from the beginning of the show in 2007 when she was fifteen. While a lot of these stars grow up before our eyes they are portraying characters that don’t grow up, plus reruns help keep the illusion alive of ‘innocent’ children well after they have become adults.

To me the problem isn’t about young actors wanting to grow away from their former roles as much as it is about parents unwilling to let the young female actors do other things.