The title of her memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck, gives you a flavour of where Carlson Romano, 42, is coming from, but what’s most striking isn’t that she goes off the rails (she doesn’t, hugely, compared to other former child stars), but how sensible and mature she is as a child. It’s alarming. When fans recognise her now – she was in the popular Disney series Even Stevens which started in 2000 – they tell her she was a huge part of their childhoods. She had been acting the part of a normal suburban girl, the perfectionist Ren Stevens, while having no idea what that was like. She was already a mini adult.
Now Carlson Romano has a social media career, which has given her a detachment from the entertainment industry. “I’m outspoken at this point, but for a lot of people they can’t do that,” she says. “What hurts is when I see other child actors suffering, because I know that means they haven’t found their way through the pain.” We speak, over Zoom, not long after Hayden Panettiere, the “Nashville” actor and singer who had started as a child and had talked about her experience of early fame, addiction and mental illness, had been found dead.
Carlson Romano grew up in Connecticut, the youngest of four. Her mother, Sharon, she says, had a competitive streak – she encouraged her two elder daughters to enter dance competitions – and focused her attentions on her youngest child. “They were less compliant, that’s what my mother said,” says Carlson Romano. “My mother said that I was a ‘good girl’, and that I would do what I was told.” Compliance, she says, is “the secret weapon of early childhood fame, and that comes at a cost over time”.
She loved performing, but she remembers that the feeling of impressing adults eclipsed any natural joy in it. “I was locked in a beam of approval and people-pleasing and wanting to make people happy with my performances.” If she did well in auditions, she was pleased that her mother was pleased.
By the time Carlson Romano’s career as a child actor was peaking, she and her mother were living in Los Angeles. Stage parents, says Carlson Romano, “can be very complicated. They are people who have dedicated their lives to their children and not to themselves. They’ve often displaced themselves from their marriages and their other children so that they could sacrifice on behalf of one child.” Now that she is a mother of two daughters, “I have a hard time reconciling how my mom justified being a stage parent to one child and not really to all of us.” She thinks her mother found it fun to shepherd her career, have a lifestyle within the entertainment industry and the reflected glory of her daughter’s success. “We enjoyed the bond that we had, but that bond got tested over time. It became more toxic and unstable and our dynamic became more professional rather than personal.”
Now, her mother lives near her in Texas and they have a good relationship. “She understands that I feel the way I feel, but she also still supports me.” She even supports Carlson Romano’s memoir, in which “she’s not portrayed in the best light, but it’s a true and complex light, and that goes to show just how motivated a stage mother my mom is.” Carlson Romano is also close to her brother, who became her financial adviser after she lost all her money (not helped by her mother’s financial mismanagement and certainly not helped by the $20,000 she paid to a psychic who claimed she could lift a curse on her). But she says she doesn’t really talk to her two older sisters. “I think that has a lot to do with what happened with my mom just not being there for them.”
