Help Your Child Actor Deal with Rejection
One of the hardest things a child actor has to deal with in the entertainment industry is rejection. No matter how talented a teen or child actor is, nor how successful he or she is, that teen or child will still have to deal with rejection and disappointment.
Sure, we all face rejection and disappointment in our lives, but actors face so much of it on a regular basis.
As I previously discussed in “What Benefits Do You Get When You Become a Child Actor?,” one potential benefit of becoming a child actor is that you often learn how to deal with rejection in a positive way.
Take a look at what occurs when an actor is submitted for an acting role:
For any given role, thousands of actors may be submitted, but only a fraction of those submitted actually even get called in to audition. (These submissions often come from you on Casting Networks/LA Casting or from Actors Access or some other casting service, or from talent agents and talent managers through Breakdown Services.)
Actors audition for many more projects than they book, often competing with hundreds and sometimes even thousands of other actors for a single role in a movie or tv show or play or commercial. And only one person is hired for a role.
So that means the rest of the hundreds (or thousands) are not getting the job. And most of these will be disappointed and feel at least a little rejected.
Frequent rejection is a big part of an actor’s life, especially for an actor who is just getting started. And no matter how old you are, dealing with that rejection can affect your confidence and feelings about yourself. But for a child actor, dealing with rejection can be especially difficult.
When my daughter was very young, she thought auditions were great fun. Mostly, she was disappointed when an audition was not long enough for her to get to chat with the casting director or when she did not get to perform as much as she wanted for the casting director. That made taking her to auditions a fun experience for me.
It was not until she moved into her tween years that she started to focus too much on the outcome of auditions.
I recall so many times that my daughter had her heart set on a particular role.
Sometimes she wanted to audition for a certain role but never got called in to audition for it. Other times she auditioned but did not get a callback, or she got one callback but not a second one. Sometimes she was one of the last two or three or four being considered or even was told the job was hers, but then the job went to another girl.
I remember her asking me on several occasions, “Why don’t they want ME?”
It is very upsetting to hear your child say something like that and see them dealing with the rejection and disappointment. And it is really hard to know exactly what to say or do, especially when you are feeling disappointed, too.
You think your child will be able to handle it. You think you’ll be able to handle it.
But the truth is, it is harder than you think.
There are so many ups and downs — what a roller-coaster ride! When things go well, it is thrilling and exciting, but when things go badly, it can be depressing and almost devastating to your child actor.
You hate to see your child or teen trying to deal with rejection.
So, what do you do?
“How do you help your child actor deal with rejection?”
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