Celebrities are people too. They eat, sleep, get married and get divorced. Their lives, while they live them in the spotlight, are not entirely different than our own. They have their own struggles just like us. While I’m not pretending they’re average Joes, they’re certainly not aliens. 

Like normal people, celebrities have children. In some cases, such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, celebrities have many children, some of whom are adopted. The public generally loves them. When an actress or singer gains a little weight, we flip our lids and wait with baited breath for the announcement that she is pregnant. We get so excited for her and her partner as if they’re our friends.

But why? 

I understand that children are cute and we enjoy the faux familiarity that we feel with celebrities and their families. However, in reality, we don’t know these people and we certainly won’t know their children. Yet we gawk over the mother and deny her the privacy that we have been denying celebrities for decades. 

Maybe we like that celebrities do what we do, but maybe we just like to meddle in other people’s affairs. Or maybe we want celebrities to do it wrong, to be bad parents or something, so we know they’re not perfect and we feel less guilty about our imperfections. Or we like to see people we have loved in movies live their lives off screen, in a well intentioned kind of way. 

After the children are born, though, it can get a little weird. 

Children are children, no matter how rich their parents are. They get dirty and gross and they cry at inopportune times. No parent can be faulted for getting a little bit (or a lot) wrong, especially at first. 

A petition involving Blue Ivy Carter, who is the adorable daughter of Jay-Z and Beyonce, made rounds on the internet in 2014. The petition, “Comb her hair,” claimed that Blue Ivy’s parents weren’t taking proper care of the baby’s hair. 

“As a woman who understands the importance of hair care, it’s disturbing to watch a child suffering from the lack of hair moisture,” Jasmine Tolliver wrote in the petition. “The parents of Blue Ivy, Sean Carter a.k.a Jay Z and Beyonce have failed at numerous attempts of doing Blue Ivy’s hair. This matter has escalated to the child developing matted dreads and lint balls. Please let’s get the word out to properly care for Blue Ivy hair.”

The petition prompted backlash and reminded me of how strange it is that many of us think that just because celebrities have made themselves more accessible to people, we believe the same accessibility stretches to their offspring.

These are children, yet we treat them with the same scrutiny as adults because of who their parents are. We write articles about what they wear and do as if they’re presenting themselves to us as models. We criticize them and pretend that’s not a sick thing to do to a child.

While children love attention, and while it might be fun for them to be treated special, growing up like a bug under a microscope doesn’t sound like a pleasant — or healthy — way to live. 

People make jokes about the pretentious nature and entitled attitude of some celebrity children, but that is a result of the excess interest in their lives. How can we expect them to become well-rounded, down-to-earth people if we follow them around, tell them they’re special and then criticize them when they don’t live up to the standards a world of strangers has set for them?

It’s a lose-lose situation that can only be remedied by allowing the young to be young and by not acting like they are little cherubs that can be poked and prodded for the entertainment of the public eye.