Mind Moves: This is the age of icons. It is the age of celebrities: a time when young stars may surface and shine in the firmament of fame.
Ireland has discovered, developed, fabricated and fashioned many young luminaries whose swift and spectacular transition from obscurity to celebrity has sent a message to all young people - you too can be famous, just wish and you will succeed.
But fame may bring more than anticipated once your child is launched on the celebrity circuit. And what benefits does fame in youth provide? Does it aid or arrest the normal transitional adolescent process? Does it hinder or enhance family relationships? What new inescapable family dynamics and sibling jealousies may emerge if one child in the family achieves overnight, serendipitous fabricated fame? And how do you ground the child whose chauffeur is in attendance?
If, as psychoanalyst Peter Blos suggests, intrafamilial struggles during adolescence reflect unresolved childhood conflicts, how can these be resolved if adolescence is sabotaged? What are the emotional costs of fame and how will your child cope with the psychological aftershock if idolization ends with the same incomprehensible velocity with which it began?
Research from the clinical world shows success carries stress that weaves its way into every corner of the child's life and there is no return to the childhood inhabited prior to fame. Relationships can never be what they once were, nor can others relate to the different person the child becomes. Overnight physical appearance may be altered: hair cut, coloured and extended, clothes chosen, images created, identity erased, replaced with an adult image of adolescent marketability. The child of yesterday may look into the mirror at this new persona stunned by the glare of public demand. The yellow brick road is a lonely road.
Many young celebrities grieve the loss of home, security and obscurity. The fan phenomenon - illusion of intimacy between star and fans that by watching the "screen" you know the teen - forges a difficult dichotomy between public and private life, a strange belief, by "intimate strangers" of ownership. The power of this para-social interaction relies on personal information and exposure. Mothers' memories may be excavated for developmental cues to stardom: family footage of childhood events become products for public consumption. Friends may betray in the most callous way, selling private photos or morsels of misinformation for personal gain.
Central to adolescence is the issue of identity. But the identity fabricated for adolescent icons may be an insensitive marketable exploitation of innocence. Simple youthful mistakes may be publicised for posterity. Stressful too is the menace of being misconstrued, of an innocent act distorted; a private moment becoming public; an innocuous remark a major offence, with no right of reply, other than to deny and thereby enter a conversation that seems to corroborate what you seek to disconfirm.
Friendships may fade because of a new inability to engage in the old activities - a stroll around the shopping centre and a bag of chips no longer possible while the normal rating and dating of adolescence is thwarted.
And sooner or later young "stars" discover that fame lasts until a new idol appears; that you are only as good as your last performance; that everything you do may be edited, interpreted and de-contextualised, so that what is said about you is barely recognisable to you as you; that if you are in love, out of love, not yet ready for love or ill-advised in whom and how you love, that this will be publicly revealed and speculated upon.
The history of Hollywood is testimony to the fickleness of fame, particularly for its more youthful stars. Being cast in the role of a cute child brings particular challenges when adulthood arrives and cuteness disappears. Stardom has not been kind to many of its most shining lights.
Some have had their childhood or adolescence dimmed by the relentless mercenary manipulations of those who first discovered and then exploited them. Some adolescents have been sexualised, their youth subjugated on the altar of voyeuristic insatiability. Other child stars have had to suffer the indignity of a flicker of fame, abandoned when childhood appeal became adolescence awkwardness. Yet others have cracked under the strain of scrutiny, finding public speculation and the loss of privacy too high a price to pay.
Growing up in the media glare can be excruciatingly psychologically difficult. Yet for an increasing number of our own Irish youth, public fame and fortune has come their way. How we celebrate their success and become sensitive to their youth is significant.
Young talent needs time and space to grow, not be plundered and depleted by overexposure before its potential has had time to unfold. If we are to be enriched by those who are genuinely gifted, then we must identify the truly talented, not manufacture fame. We must nurture those with purity of voice, power of creativity, breath of vision, those with dramatic depth and deep imagining. We must guard the new guardians of man's creativity, originality, ingenuity, inspiration and inventiveness.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St. Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin.