Children Shouldn’t Be Free Marketing Fodder

Hanging on the wall in my parents’ house is a picture of my older brother and me moving into a new home. I’m holding a teddy bear, he has a box with a few toys poking out the top. I am guessing I’m around 5 years old and he was 8. The funny thing is I never lived in that house and the man and woman in the photo aren’t even my parents, yet my mother insists on proudly displaying the framed image.

It is important to know that as children my brother and I did a bit of acting and modeling. In addition to the image above (which I think was for a home insurance company), I was also in a commercial for regional phone company, a national cereal brand, and one cold February day I had to go down a water slide about fifty times while the cameraman tried to capture of video of me smiling for a waterpark commercial. (It was cold. I was in 2nd grade. I don’t think I ever smiled.)

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