Advocate For Children In Hollywood -- Paul Peterson

When I was young, I was fortunate to grow up with Nick at Nite and watch all the classics from the 50's and early 60's. One of those shows included, "The Donna Reed Show" and as any girl would, I fell in love with Paul Peterson who played Donna's son, Jeff Stone.

I decided to do a post about people who have influenced me in some way during the course of my childhood. Watching old tv shows has definitely allowed me to have a unique perspective of the entertainment industry and how much it changed in the course of merely one generation. Donna Reed was one of my favorite shows for many reasons. Obviously Peterson was one of them but the innocence, the sincerity, and simple yet positive story lines were entertaining and offered an ideal or standard for people to strive for. The world was made simple, black and white - literally as well as metaphorically. There was a distinction between right and wrong and the right way of doing things was actually praised rather than frowned upon.

Interestingly, during all the years I watched these older shows, not once did I feel uncomfortable watching them with my parents. These days, you can hardly turn on the tv and watch a regular sitcom without blushing if your parents or children are in the room. Everything is about sex or sex or more sex. There is nothing original about modern television.

During these "classic" years of TV, entertainers in Hollywood like Paul Peterson actually had to have skills. You could rarely find an actor that could not sing and dance as well. Peterson proved he fit right in by moving over to a singing career after The Donna Reed show. In modern times, it seems as though many actors can barely act let alone try and belt out a tune or do the waltz.

Peterson also went to college and developed his writing skills; has authored several books. He now works with an organization he found called, A Minor Consideration. The organization was created as a result of the suicide of Paul's friend, Rusty Hammer. Hammer was also a child actor that played Rusty Williams on the very popular show, Make Room For Daddy, which also stared Danny Thomas. Peterson recognized a need for supporting those actors that started out in the business as children. Transitioning from child to adult is something that can easily take a toll on a person's spirituality. Besides Rusty, there are countless examples of child-stars who have been destroyed by the Hollywood machine. It seems as time goes on, the casualties have steadily increased.

I ran across an interesting interview of Peterson that was on the website Boomerocity. Paul goes into greater detail about A Minor Consideration and the work they have done to help children who are in show business as well as other children who are a part of the everyday workforce.

From the interview:

“And, then, my wife – who is a show business nurse – posed a very interesting question to all of us. ‘Why are we doing all these interventions’, she asked, ‘when should be preventing these troubles?’  We sort of branched off from our core mission of providing friendship and financial support and emotional support into actually tackling the structure within which young people work.  First, in entertainment then it got a little larger. Then it was sports. Then it was, ‘Well, wait a minute, there are a lot of working kids.’ 

“Five million children go to work every day in America.  In America! Five million.  And, many of them – like the children in the entertainment world – are exempt from federal child labor laws. 

“Who’s watching the number of hours they put in? Who’s guarding their health in the work place? Who’s protecting their certain need for an education? When you see the hodgepodge of laws – limited though they may be – it really is alarming. We have let this area of the workplace go unattended. We all kind of say, ‘Well, we’re not a third world country.’  

“Well, tell that to the 800,000 children who pick our food out of the fields of America who don’t go to school and who are busy trying to put food on the table. And there’s 800,000 of them!  It’s just not the 300,000 children in show business and the sports world who lack attention. There are millions – literally millions of children working who don’t have the protections we assume are in place.  That has truly become the focus of A Minor Consideration these days.  We need to change the rules.”

 The interview continues and Peterson talks straight about liberals in Hollywood:

Those comments and statistics dumbfounded me as he easily rolled them off of his tongue. They also destroyed my assumption that surely, with all the laws and regulations in place today that weren’t in place when Petersen was a child actor, there isn’t a problem anymore. I was especially puzzled by the exposure of the 300,000 child actors in this country’s entertainment industry.  I mean, isn’t this the same “Hollywood” whose members always champion a wide variety of humanitarian causes?  I asked Paul exactly that question. 

“Well, that’s the lie, you see. It is my experience that a lot of liberals I know don’t seem to have any math skills. That’s why they constantly overspend their income. They talk a good game but they don’t live it!  When you see an adult person – a performer – working on a family sitcom in which all three children involved in the enterprise are in serious emotional trouble and don’t actually go to school even for the three hour minimum required by law and they don’t speak up, you gotta ask yourself, ‘What are they thinking?’

Yes, what are liberals thinking? This is a question that was brought up in 2007 concerning the young actress Dakota Fanning (a child who was made to perform in a rape scene at the age of twelve), on the show Hannity and Colmes. The exchange between Peterson and Colmes reveals the true evil that resides at the core of liberalism. It is a must watch.

Colmes: So we should stop the motion picture industry from being allow to represent this?  

Peterson: You know, the motion picture industry is not some noble undertaking. It's a business and it does not have the right to abuse a child..... There is no redeeming value here.  

Colmes then asks Peterson if he wants arrests to be made by the government. Peterson says yes and makes it clear that this is abuse and against the law. This type of entertainment is not art. The child actors are purposely exposed to risk for the purposes of "entertainment." 

The video is older but its meaning and value can still be applied today. Children who work inside of today's Hollywood are routinely praised and given fame, only to be left out in the cold when the actor begins to age or their show gets cancelled. It certainly doesn't take a genius to figure out that when you have a child working in the entertainment field, exposed to drugs, coupled with no moral values, education, or structure, you have a recipe for disaster. How is it there are so few voices inside the industry that speak out against this treatment? You're much more likely to hear one of these entertainers speaking about animal cruelty before they speak of the cruelty that is placed upon children in their own backyards.

G-d Bless Paul Peterson! He is truly an American treasure who deserves recognition for all his hard work. His life is most certainly an example of the American dream.

Sources:

Wikipedia: Paul Peterson.
Boomerocity Interview:
Website: A Minor Consideration.