Stage Savvy Parents: Are You Helping or Hurting? 5 Common Mistakes Parents of Young Performers Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Raising a young performer is an incredible journey filled with unique challenges and rewards. However, even the most supportive parents can make common mistakes that will, the overwhelming majority of the time, hinder their child’s progress. Here’s a countdown of the top five mistakes parents of performers make in our almost two and a half decades of observation, with insights on how to avoid them.

5. Coaching Your Own Child in Areas You Lack Expertise

It’s natural to want to help your child succeed, but offering advice in areas you’re not experienced in can do more harm than good. If you cannot change the fuse on a plug, it isn’t effective to give electrical advice. The same is true of all vocations, including acting, dancing, singing, and the performing arts more widely. As parents, you want to be involved and helpful in every aspect of your child’s life. While your support is invaluable, it’s also important to recognize the expertise of professional instructors who are experienced in guiding your child in specific areas. Trusting their guidance while providing emotional support at home can create a balanced environment for your child’s growth.

4. Overestimating Local Success

Just because your child excels in local performances or groups doesn’t necessarily mean that this translates nationally. Nationally, the competition is fierce, and the standards are often incredibly high. Celebrate every achievement your child makes, whether big or small. It’s natural to take pride in local successes. However, understanding the broader competitive landscape can help set realistic expectations (important for parents also) and motivate your child to strive for excellence on a larger scale.

3. Putting All Your Eggs in the Performing Arts Basket

Each year, around 10,000 young professionals and graduates enter the performing arts industry, making it highly competitive. They all believe that this is their career. It won’t be.

It’s crucial not to limit your child’s future to just performing arts or a specific strand of performing arts, like being on stage. As parents, you want to cherish your child’s passion for performing arts. Encouraging them to explore other interests alongside their performing arts training can provide them with a well-rounded skill set and open up additional opportunities for their future. This can include, but is not limited to, stage management, wigs, props, PR, orchestral management, hundreds more, etc. This balanced approach will provide more options and security when crunch time arrives at age 18.

2. Encouraging a Professional Performing Career

We have always been of the view that young performers should be actively discouraged from performing professionally! Performing professionally is HARD. Not just in terms of competition for jobs, but more so mentally. Rejection after rejection and a SUCCESSFUL professional, and by that we mean someone who gets enough work regularly to live, is ‘out of work’ the majority of the time and having to supplement income with casual jobs that allow you time off for auditions.

As parents, you want to support your child’s dreams. Your intention is not to discourage their passion – many people have passions that they are not paid for, but to provide a realistic perspective on the challenges of a professional performing career. By understanding these challenges early on, you can better prepare your child for the journey ahead and support them in developing the resilience they will need to succeed.

Most performers quit within 2/3 years of entering the industry, many a bit sooner, and most don’t get a second performing job after being placed in a professional pantomime by their college. It’s brutal, and if your child has anything less than iron determination to face down these challenges, suffer, and go against the grain, it will almost always end in tears – and very expensive ones.

The harsh reality is that colleges have huge overheads to pay. You won’t get any change from £30,000 and getting into a full-time 18+ college doesn’t remotely mean that you will make it professionally (see point #3).

In our view, a professional performing arts career should be pursued AGAINST parental advice! That way, if they go against that advice, at least you have a good indication that they have the mental fortitude to withstand what is ahead of them.

1. Presumed Wisdom

The biggest and by far the most common mistake is making significant, key decisions without getting the advice of experienced professionals who know your child.

As parents, your instincts and knowledge about your child are valid. However, seeking the counsel of experienced professionals who have guided your child and have advised very many students through similar decisions provide crucial additional insights and ensure the best possible outcomes for your child’s future.

Teachers and instructors will have seen countless students navigate the same paths and make the same key decisions that your family faces and can offer invaluable insights. They will have seen how the decisions actually play out for hundreds, sometimes thousands of performers with attributes and characteristics just like your child. Parents often have magical thinking that their child’s talents and attributes are unique and have never been seen before. They are not, and the grass will have been trodden many, many times before.

While, of course, parents know their child best on a human level, they do not have the perspective or insight needed to make informed, evidence-based, and effective decisions on their own about their child’s future in performing arts – unless they have trodden the same pathway themselves successfully.

Always seek advice from those who have a broader view and more experience in the field before making key decisions. Try and avoid a situation where you are announcing to your child’s teachers what their next best step is. You’re not about to announce to your electrician what the next step in the re-wiring job is?

Here are just two of many real-world examples to illustrate the point:

Example 1: A young performer at West End Kids was offered a very exciting pop music opportunity/contract with Disney. The parents sought the advice of their teachers at West End Kids. Advice was given that, while obviously very tempting, this was not, in our view, going to be beneficial in the long term (eyes on the prize!) and would exacerbate current issues within their performance attributes that needed addressing first. All things considered, it wasn’t worth it for five minutes of fame. Not easy advice to give! The young lady in question’s parents followed the recommended path instead and she went on to become a leading lady in the West End and worldwide.

Example 2: Another, older, teenage young performer asked for advice on potential college destinations. They were advised on which colleges we thought were the most appropriate and which were inappropriate for their individual circumstances, strengths, and weaknesses. We advised that they would likely be offered a place in the inappropriate colleges because there was a desire to maximise revenue and fill the courses, which had recently been significantly expanded.

Sadly however, the parents chose to ignore / not ask directly for advice and the child went on to secure a place in a college which was advised against for this individual performer. The performer quit the college after 9 months and the parents lost £40,000.

The performer then went on to get a full scholarship at the recommended college and subsequently became a West End leading man.

By avoiding these common mistakes, parents can better support their young performers and help them achieve their full potential and find their right pathway.