Friend and child modelling

[Jazzybean]

A good friend’s children (preschool age) have recently gotten into child modelling. She has become so boring ever since! Constant social media contact with agencies, castings, tagging companies she wants to work with directly, individual Instagram accounts for the children, posting headshots and size/height details, re-posting various modelling related stories… I feel like her life is now one big walking advert. It all seems a bit unsavoury tbh.

AIBU to think that if the children were especially gifted, she wouldn’t have to work this hard to get them noticed (and I wouldn’t have to see all of this drivel), or is this really how it is?

I’m on the verge of unfollowing her but I’m semi-hoping she gets bored when her eldest goes to school and normal service will resume. She posts on my stories etc quite a lot so it would be fairly obvious if I suddenly stopped following her on Instagram for example!

not that a good friend if you cannot tell her

Of course she has to do all that to get them noticed, it's not like they're going to be discovered in Asda. # is where it's at these days.
Unfollow her on everything if you really don't want to see it.

Someone I know is a model. People aren't "discovered" walking down the street anymore. People either have connections into the industry or they're "discovered" on social media through specific hashtags.

Once discovered, it's a very crowded and fast-changing market. Companies and agencies will find people on social media for their campaigns. So you have to make your social media stand out to grab their attention.

Constant posting is about getting your face out there and getting attention, but its also about showing you're serious and committed.

I'm not too fussed about it but I can see how it'd be tedious if it were a friend.

My dd modelled when she was little. She was signed up to a good agency. I occasionally shared photos of her when they were released on fb. No you don’t have to do all that promotion, that’s what your agency does and why they get paid. They have the accounts with the clients and put forward the kids that fill the brief.

She didn’t get ‘discovered’ I sent a couple of photos in and they said yes. It’s really not complicated.

Why would an agency, client or advertising agent be looking on social media for new ‘talent’?

client calls agent, send me your 8 year old girls, blond and redheads who are available next week, agent send out for availability, parent confirms, agent sends short list, clients picks two or three, agents licences kids. Why would they waste time scrolling the internet?

You do have to do a lot of work to get noticed, especially with child modelling. The market is saturated. Even with an agent, you still have to work hard. It’s not a case of if her children were ‘gifted’ they wouldn’t need to do all that work. The whole modelling industry is based on looks and personality, along with any talents you have. It’s not about being gifted. For every model, there’s another 1000 models all wanting the same job.

Times have changed since the birth of instagram. Child models generally aren’t scouted by agents via social media and you have to apply via their website and give consent as their parent but some commercial modelling agencies have a specific hash tag like #scoutme{agentsname} for older models

This is like the olden days of MN with the mogelling threads [misty eyed]

She's excited by it all and you are not. Sounds like most friendships where one person has a giant interest in something that the other is not very interested in. Unless you live with her it ought to be easy to make nice noises at appropriate moments of success and sad ones at disappointed moments and crack on as mates.

Are you hating it more because it is about the kids and not cakes or cycling or some other tedious hobby type thing? If it is a moral or values issue for you then you might be in 'end of friendship' territory.

Disapproval and distaste kills a friendship much faster than boredom of a person's chosen obsessive hobby does.

You don’t have to do all of this stuff as a parent for child models to be successful . Do you know which agency it is ? Tagging brands on insta won’t make them more likely to pick the child . It’s the agents job to submit the child to clients for jobs .

@KStockHERO @GalileoHumpkins My friends’s daughter was recently ‘discovered’ by a big agency when wandering round a shopping mall, so it absolutely does still happen.