C“Hild Star,” a new documentary directed by Demi Lovato, wisely doesn’t begin with the former Disney star or any of the former child actors who appear in the film – Kenan Thompson, Drew Barrymore, Christina Ricci and Jojo Siwa, to name a few. Instead, a group of anonymous children are asked simple questions by an off-camera adult: What do you want to do when you grow up? What does it mean to be famous? “It’s a bit like being popular in school, only a thousand times more,” says one. “The bad thing about it is that you can become very selfish,” says another, stumbling over the last word. How do you feel on camera? “I’m a little nervous, but also happy,” says one girl.

The conclusion is succinct and obvious: a child’s brain is fundamentally not developed enough to comprehend fame or how the present moment will shape their future. How would they know? And yet, as the film shows through several examples (including Lovato’s own), some children are naturally inclined to achieve, even preternaturally talented. Some want being in front of the camera. Being a child star is big business and also has a huge impact on child viewers. “I still think about what ‘on-brand’ is,” says Lovato. “Those words should never be used together – role model for teenagers.” And yet, as long as young people yearn to see themselves on screen, and as long as there is money to be made from it, it will be like that. What are we to make of this?

Child Star predictably made headlines for revealing Lovato’s tumultuous and long-documented personal history (she’s been the star of three documentaries, most recently the almost pathologically frank Dancing with the Devil in 2021). If you’re into Disney Channel lore, it’s certainly notable that Raven-Symoné describes Lovato as “not the nicest” when they worked together back in the day, or that Lovato and Camp Rock co-star Alyson Stoner bonded over their respective eating disorders. For another generation, it’s notable that Ricci calls her father a “failed cult leader” or that Thompson learned he was cheated out of his childhood earnings when his financial “manager” bolted the day he was about to buy his first house. The film weaves these interviews into an attempt to provide a brief overview of the history of child stardom in the United States, beginning with silent film actor Jackie Coogan and angelic icon Shirley Temple—how child labor laws exempted child actors, only to see the industry explode, particularly when cable networks like Nickelodeon and Disney began targeting young audiences with homegrown child stars.

Yet as fleeting and incomplete as the film may be, it works best as a collective therapy session about what such an experience — once rarified, now relatable in an age of constant self-promotion — looks like in retrospect. How to make sense of growing up on the job and in the public eye? Stoner, who now hosts a podcast about child stars and is armed with a study showing that the stress of fame shortens a person’s life by more than a decade, points out that appearing on camera as a child required detachment; Lovato says she doesn’t remember most of her time at Disney. For her, and for Barrymore and Ricci, starving, vomiting, drugs, alcohol and acting out provided, as Stoner puts it, “the only sense of safety and control you have.” For some, the performances were an escape from a broken home life or childhood bullies; for all, they exacerbated their already confused parent-child relationships.

The central theme, addressed more than once, is blunt: It’s psychologically damaging to know you’re a commodity. Some stars are more business than others; the film mentions that Hannah Montana – the Disney Channel show that became the benchmark for a new generation of pop stars – earned the company over a billion dollars in merchandise and licensing deals at its peak. Siwa, a Nickelodeon star for Generation Z’s Generation Alpha, recalls how the network forced her to personally call every retailer after she came out as a lesbian to assure them she wasn’t going crazy.

Lovato’s documentary is part of a larger, amorphous look back at millennial icons, from several Britney Spears documentaries to Selena Gomez’s My Mind & Me, the incredibly dark allegations in the Nickelodeon expose Quiet on Set to the burgeoning industry of nostalgia podcasts. Child Star is a promising if limited directorial debut; you just wish she could talk to more of her Disney colleagues, and it only briefly touches on topics like addiction, paparazzi, or what happens when the spotlight fades. (All of the former child stars who are included are still in the business, and there are several eras that aren’t represented.)

But the film’s message goes beyond traditional child stars. Just as millennials like me, asked who we watched growing up, would have said Gomez in Barney or Miley Cyrus in Hannah Montana, kids today—in the group Lovato assembled and in my personal life almost exactly—respond that they don’t watch TV. They watch YouTube. They watch kids like Ryan Kaji, who started playing with toys at age 3 on a channel his family ran and is now, at 12, one of the highest-paid YouTubers in the world. They watch Charli D’Amelio, a high school student who rose to stardom on TikTok and whose short-lived Hulu reality show demonstrated the fragile prison of dizzying viral fame. They watch any number of social media “content creators” who have come to dwarf traditional media in terms of viewership. They look at each other on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram, which provide both an outlet for identity and a hall of mind-distorting mirrors.

Fame now, as it was then, is too much for a young mind to comprehend — only bigger. Too big even for this film, which strikes at and then cuts away at something fertile, frightening and real. Lovato closes by advocating that the acting industry’s so-called Coogan Laws, which set aside a portion of earnings for child actors to be accessed when they turn 18, apply to nontraditional content creators as well. A noble cause, but a small protection for a phenomenon that won’t end and for which there is no prescribed way to deal. Siwa admits at one point that she posts hundreds of Snapchat stories a day because people will watch. The demand is there — just as it exists, on a smaller but still recognizable scale, for regular kids posting. Child stars, the film argues, have long existed as projection objects for regular kids; now they are increasingly role models for attention who, along with their viewers, will have a lot to process.