PicoBlog

Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode of Dance Moms, a Lifetime produced reality show that first aired in 2011, a minister bursts through the studio doors into the middle of  practice to yell at Abby Lee Miller, the former dancer turned instructor and studio owner turned reality star. The minister is also a Dance Mom, and she’s livid that her daughter Regan was kicked out of acrobatics class for wearing socks. Miller, known for her no-nonsense attitude toward dance, chalks it up to a safety concern. She kicks both Dawn and her daughter out of the studio, but not before calling Regan pathetic. For a few minutes, Dawn follows Abby, shouting at her as she weaves in and out of rehearsal and changing rooms. Ultimately, Abby enters another rehearsal room filled with older students in the middle of a practice, borrows a phone, and calls the cops on Minister Dawn. “There’s a psycho in every batch,” Miller says as her senior dancers stretch in the background. 

The show uses this scene to set up a war between two dueling factions: the masterful Miss Abby Lee and her determined students, and the crazy mothers who just want to hold them back. Never mind that a decade later, Regan and her mom went on to reveal in a TikTok video that before the altercation, Miller had made comments about the 10-year-old Regan’s weight and intelligence. It was typical, all just a part of Miller’s method: She’d rather make students cry in the privacy of her studio, she would say, rather than have them cry during an audition. 

A few of the other plot points that followed in that first season: a controversy over the girls (who were between the ages of 6 and 13) wearing overly sexualized costumes, a series of injuries that one of the girls is encouraged to perform through, a decision to typecast the only Black dancer on the team, and a fear that the girls will be traumatized by performing a dance routine about missing children and kidnappings. In each of these moments, the moms battle it out with Miller, often going back to the refrain that “they’re just kids.” Abby Lee Miller always lobs back the same answer, though: This is what it takes to make it in this industry. She’s simply preparing them for what’s to come. 

Since the show originally aired, many of the dancers and stars have come out and explained that while no episode was scripted (meaning, they were never handed a script), the dramatic climaxes were often staged by producers. Always in the background, the many (mostly male) producers encouraged the moms to fight with each other — and allegedly, many of the fights ended in laughter as soon as the cameras turned off. But what’s always fascinated me about reality TV are the cultural truths that you can pick out from that which appears to be fake. 

In the case of Dance Moms, what I see is the bleak reality of being a child star, which is the transformation of a child into an employee at any cost. It’s an all too familiar formula: The forced sexualization of girls at a young age. The pressure to prioritize the performance over one’s health, physical or mental. The racism that people of color must swallow and — in the words of Miller — use to their “advantage” when seeking out work. The adult themes that children must be exposed to in order to create the product. The intentional alienation of the children from their families, characterized as clueless obstacles in the way of success, by the all-knowing industry professionals, who wield the power of plucking regular people out of obscurity and dropping them into the limelight. The conditions of young fame are being widely discussed now by former child stars like Miley Cyrus, Drew Barrymore, Jeanette McCurdy, Melissa Joan Hart, and Brooke Shields, but Dance Moms showed them in real time. 

Dance Moms, which came out when I was 13 years old, was the first reality show I ever watched religiously. Unlike popular reality franchises at the time — The Hills, Real Housewives, The Simple Life — the stars were my age, and the plot was familiar. I had grown up on content about regular kids who get to make it big, and had fun doing it (Think: Disney’s Hannah Montana or Sonny With a Chance or Nickelodeon's answer to the genre, iCarly and Victorious). But what differentiated Dance Moms from what I was used to was the pit in my stomach I felt during every episode. While many of the episodes had funny moments in the midst of the moms’ verbal sparring, it wasn’t fun watching Miller throw a chair at Paige (age 13) during rehearsal or hurl insults at Chloe, whose plotline revolved around being second best (or as Miller would to say, “the first to lose”). It was scary — and it made me feel thankful to be at home, laying on my pink and yellow quilt with my drawings on the walls and stuffed animals at my side, rather than filming and dancing and competing for hours on end. 

The chance to get famous never looked like it was worth it, even as the show became more popular and the girls got more professional opportunities (the season one finale showed the girls being cast as dancers in a music video, for example) — and the characters even said on the show that it wasn’t. Much of the drama each season revolved around whether one or multiple of the girls from the main team would quit, on account of not being able to handle the immense pressure or pain that came from being one of Abby’s dancers anymore. Even what was perhaps staged felt real. I mean, Paige Hyland’s family did sue Abby post–chair incident after all. 

While you can argue that reality TV has gotten much more provocative in the last decade, with gaudy cringebait like MILF Manor or Couple to Throuple, it’s also become much more buttoned up on the backend. Reality TV is an inherently exploitative genre — often asking people to showcase their most vulnerable moments to global audiences and endure endless scrutiny, sometimes for no pay at all — but one thing that’s changed over time is how much of the negatives we’re allowed to actually see. On Love Island, we don’t hear about how contestants are being filmed nearly all day, with no access to the outside world or even to an accurate time; on Love Is Blind, we didn’t know that contestants were sleeping in single-room trailers. What we see are the smiles and what we hear is gratitude for “the experience.” Later, online, we see the brand deals and opportunities that make their way to these new stars. We’re shocked when we start to see the tell-alls and the lawsuits — whether it’s Rachel Lindsey speaking publicly about the racism that’s part of the Bachelorette franchise’s DNA, the Real Housewives revealing that drinking heavily is almost a required part of the job when you work for Bravo, or the contestants from the reality spin off of Squid Game threatening legal action after being injured on set — but after enough time passes, we sit down for another season of our favorite franchise. Sometimes, it comes with some facelifts. (Does anyone remember when they used to drink and smoke cigarettes all night on the early seasons of Love Island??)

Production companies have gotten wiser to the dangers of granting unfiltered access to what’s really going on with their reality stars — and the result is a much more sanitized portrayal of the lives of regular people turned stars. Since Dance Moms, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen another show that pulls back the curtain so eagerly to show what child stars really go through before they grow into the adults who lived to tell the tale. 

This process is becoming especially obscured now, as mommy bloggers turn their whole families into influencers and child stars are born on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube instead of the silver screen. In this newest frontier of child labor, the industry is even less regulated — and the content that we see, now controlled by the stars or their parents themselves, is wiped clean of any real controversy. 

When I watch back old clips of Dance Moms, I think of Brooke Shields shooting nude scenes in Pretty Baby when she was 11 or Evan Rachel Wood snorting crushed vitamin pills to simulate substance abuse at age 14 in Thirteen. Both of these feel closer to what was shown on Dance Moms than mommy blogs or, say, The D’Amelio Show — Hulu’s 2012 docu-dive into the “real life” of teen TikTok sensations Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. In this show, hurtful online comments and generalized anxiety are the primary villains, and the stars insist that the positives (winning Teen Choice Awards, attending red carpets in designer clothing, and starting fashion lines) outweigh those negatives. On one hand, it’s supposed to raise awareness about the mental health impacts of cyberbullying, even on the rich and famous, but on the other, it’s also supposed to be aspirational. Bright colors, sunny, natural light, and spotless, Architectural Digest–worthy new furnishings adorn the California mansion of the always made up D’Amelio clan, who often appear hugging and laughing together (in on-trend clothing, of course). 

It’s a stark contrast to the fluorescent-lit and dreary Pittsburgh dance studio, a rectangular building made of bricks painted a faded white, where much of Dance Moms takes place. Both the D’Amelio parents and the Dance Moms insist that their children can stop whenever they want and live “normal lives,” though they both continue to drive them (physically and emotionally) to attend every meeting, audition, and appearance. Unlike the D’Amelio parents, who are portrayed as loving and competent and caring, the Dance Moms are often villainized — especially by Abby. (In one season three scene, Kelly, who was a former student of Abby’s when she was young, breaks down because Abby took her two daughters out of a dance and blamed it on her actions. In return, Abby shouts the refrain: “I am the best thing for Paige.”) 

Perhaps most importantly, the D’Amelio parents rarely bristle up against the managers who ensure their daughters will be as lucrative as possible. They’ve learned to expertly and subtly play by the rules. At least on TV, their family unit appears lacquered, not unlike the highly edited and produced mommy blogs that insist a family really can be perfect. On Dance Moms, the family dynamics are messy and passionate. While the moms are guilty of the same crimes as the D’Amelios — trying to profit off their children, entering their children into an industry known for swallowing innocence up whole — the portrayal of their attempt to navigate the uncertain and dangerous path of fame comes across as much more real. Most of them had jobs, some were single mothers, all took on the role of the primary caregiver of their children. Because of these conditions, even when their conflicts were staged, they rang emotionally true. Of course, they lost control when a dance teacher berated their child. And, sadly, of course they came back instead of accepting that all that pain endured may have been for nothing. We watched them bet on the success at the end of the tunnel. If the child influencers of today ever take the same risks, we don’t see them. 

Leave a comment

While the D’Amelios bounced around between business meetings with high-powered executives and recording studios helmed by some of LA’s finest, the Dance Moms troupe boarded buses to travel to regional dance children’s dance competitions that took place in school auditoriums in New Jersey. The children often cried as their moms, fighting amongst themselves, sewed costume hats into their hair and drew eyeliner on their lids. The moms rationalized that, despite the bullying, Abby Lee Miller was the best teacher in the area that money could buy, that their child had such close friends at the studio, that this was the path to a life as a professional dancer. 

The worst part was that, even when they followed all of Miller’s instructions, they didn’t even always win. Most often, the stakes of the show are painfully low — and that’s what makes it even more difficult to watch. Yes — eventually Maddie gets cast by Sia to appear in a number of her music videos (though their relationship has come under fire, as speculations arised that Sia groomed Maddie, a common occurrence for child stars) and the girls get auditions at a prestigious dance school and they go on to start side hustles as YouTubers. But they also all meet the same fate: One by one, they decide they can no longer handle the drama, and all tearfully leave Abby. Since then, the members of the original cast have had varying levels of fame, but all are much less in the public eye — if you don’t count their carefully curated social media pages with millions of Instagram followers. They’ve found a new way to be famous, one that allows them to control how they’re perceived with razor-sharp precision. I just hope that their families, now out of the spotlight, are taking care of them behind the scenes. — LM

Find further reading and resources on this week’s topic below!

What we’ve read and DMed each other about lately — our internet bounty is below!

• “Heaven or High Water” by Sarah Miller - Popula — While reporting this piece, Miller posed as a wealthy homebuyer looking to invest in some real estate in Miami. She speaks to a number of agents, all who assure her that the whole climate change thing is nothing to worry about and that “they fixed it.” The result is an ingenious and deeply uncomfortable look at what’s happening on the ground in a quickly flooding Florida. — LM

• “The Lure of Divorce” by Emily Gould - The Cut — I haven’t even read this yet, but it’s obvious from the jump that this is the kind of piece that you wait until you have a really clear moment to sit with. I can’t wait. Emily Gould is always a must read. — MF

• “100 Small Acts of Love” by Melonyce McAfee and Catherine Pearson - NYTimes— On a more joyful note, the illustrations on this are so cute, and every one of these made me smile and think of all the little things my boyfriend and I do, too. Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day! — MF

Why Not? is our biweekly list of recommendations. Think recipes, gift guides, podcasts, clothes, and anything we consider to be generally chic. Have a suggestion? Let us know!

• Pickleball — Ladies and gentlemen… They got me. I played pickleball for the first time last weekend, and it’s really really fun. I will definitely be playing again soon. — LM

• Ameerat Al Arab Prive Rose Asdaaf perfume — If you love Delina, you’ll love this too. I’ll let the notes of this perfume speak for itself: strawberries, grapes, orange, rose, white musk, tonka bean, sandalwood, and white florals. Fruity floral hive, rise up! A perfect belated Valentine’s scent. — MF

• Lola Dress - Cult Gaia — I’m such a sucker for Cult Gaia, so I couldn’t resist their recent “removing sale” (bizarre name). I picked up this dress that I had been coveting from afar and I’m so happy with it! While they’re sold out on their site, I’m still seeing resellers like Farfetch with a few in stock. — LM

• 437 active apparel - Miami Sample — I can’t vouch for their swim and clothing offerings because I haven’t tried them, but I really love the V-leggings from this brand. When I saw there was a huge sample sale going on, I ran to stock up and fill some gaps in my workout wardrobe! — MF

  Leave a comment

If you liked this issue, put us on the top of your pyramid! Tell us your thoughts in the comments or on Instagram (@lilly_milman | @melindafakuade), and share it with your favorite child star.

ncG1vNJzZmiZnpnBqbXSoqqwoKljwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89orpqrXZmur6%2FEZqSopaNivLa%2BjKWYrKxdp7KiuMisq6Kb