Bonsall Arrest No Surprise, Fellow Child TV Star Says
by Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

One look at Brian Bonsall's mug shot - the tattoos, the laceration, the rings pierced through the bottom lip - and Paul Petersen knew "plainly there's trouble" with another former child TV star.

Bonsall, 25, who played the Keaton family's youngest child on the 1980s sitcom Family Ties and later acted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, was arrested last week in Boulder on four counts of domestic violence in connection with an incident involving his girlfriend.

Petersen, 61, played son Jeff on The Donna Reed Show in the 1960s and now tries to help other former child stars adjust to life away from the limelight through his organization A Minor Consideration.

"Brian is at a most critical and dangerous time in his life," Petersen said Thursday from his California home. "We're pleading for Brian to get hold of us."

He said the organization offers emotional and psychological counseling, financial advice and other services.

"He doesn't know it because he's a little confused now, but he has hundreds of friends willing to help," Petersen said. "People who've been down the same path, who've had their mug shots in the papers, who know how to fix it."

There's no mystery why so many former child stars get in trouble, said Petersen, who himself is a recovering alcoholic.

"What do we expect when a young person's childhood is taken away from him?" he said. "When he's exposed to a life he can't sustain? . . .

"You're constantly prodded to please everyone, to not act out, to give the company line, to say that you're happy, to say that you're working for your college education.

"And then, they pull the rug out" - the TV show is canceled, the career fades. "They're not kids anymore; they're not cute anymore. They're thrown on the scrap heap."

Petersen was 17 in 1962, rich and famous, surrounded by "fast cars and faster women," but his grandfather could tell he wasn't happy and urged him to find a job he truly loved.

"When I was spun into the real world at 21, the kid raised to be the next Cary Grant, it was a brutal awakening."

"That's Brian's situation," Petersen said. "You get angry and bitter."

And you don't have those "fire alarm" friends around you.

"You don't have those good friends who blow the whistle, scream the alarm when you contemplate changing the color of your skin or bopping your nose or putting rings in your lips," Petersen said.

"That's why Brian's mug shot is so revealing. I can well understand that with no career to speak of, but high name recognition, Brian feels he's been abandoned."

Six hundred former child stars are affiliated with A Minor Consideration, and it has reached out to thousands of others who are recovering from high expectations and brutal reality in the fields of show business and athletics, Petersen said.

"Children are used up and thrown out by an industry that doesn't care," Petersen said. "You're witnessing it with Britney Spears. . . . . Our culture has decided that a few casualties along the way are perfectly acceptable."

The perception that a rich and famous child star is in control of his or her career isn't even close, he said.

"Look at Britney. Does she look like she's in control? At 12 she was a Mouseketeer, given over to the star machine. . . . Now people are surprised that the wheels came off?"

Many people have little sympathy for child stars gone bad because they say they gladly would have changed places with them. Indeed, the blogs on Bonsall's arrest are full of jokes.

"He now looks like someone who could play a pretty convincing Klingon - quite a change," one said.

"Ouch. Another child star bites the dust," another said.

A Minor Consideration is chronically short of money. After Anna Nicole Smith's death, Petersen appeared on a dozen news shows, talking about the group. "We didn't get a single dollar" in donations, he said.

What to do to end the decades-long child-star-gone-bad syndrome? For one thing, make sure the child actors have talent and dedication, Petersen said.

MGM wasn't the ideal spot for kid actors in the 1930s, but at least they picked "the most talented kids on the planet," Petersen said. "We have to raise that standard again.

"Before you say to someone, 'You have the opportunity to be famous,' make sure that they really do, that they've gone through the lessons, that they've built the performer's mentality, that they might have the confidence to believe that they really deserve it.

"Second, remember that they are children, that if they're sick with the flu, you shouldn't give them that old canard 'The show must go on.' "

But Bonsall and other former child stars "can make it through the mine field." Petersen said.

"I seriously lost my way," he said. "But you can pop out the other side if you have a support team around you. It's not about looking out for your professional success, but looking at you as a person.

"The trouble is, each five years a new group of stage parents puts their children out there for rent or sale. They never listen to us. They believe they're smarter, better, know more, love better.

"It's just ludicrous. They're making the same mistakes."