Mum’s the worry

As Whitney Houston demonstrated, it’s showbusiness parents who are most likely to go off the rails.

NOW is not what one might call a golden moment for Hollywood parenting, especially if one is the teenage or earlytwenty something daughter of a highly strung celebrity.

Whitney Houston’s 18-year-old offspring Bobbi Kristina Brown was reportedly on suicide watch after informing relatives that she “doesn’t want to live any more” in the wake of her mother’s death on Feb 11.

Courtney Love’s daughter Frances Bean Cobain, 19, has revealed in a sworn testimony that her drug-addled mother has been putting their lives at risk and is responsible for the death of two family pets.

And Demi Moore’s daughters are bearing the brunt of their emaciated, increasingly erratic mother’s behaviour following the demise of her marriage to Ashton Kutcher, an actor nearer their own age.

Time was when teens were the candidates most likely to be involved in drink and drug abuse, mental instabil-instability, anorexia or histrionics over a broken relationship.

These days – at least among showbusiness’business’ rich and famous – it is the so-called adults who are off the rails, and the teenagers who must pick up the pieces.

Prior to her death, the 48-year-old Houston was observed skipping wildly and doing headstands before being led away from a party by her distraught child.

Moore’s daughter Rumer Willis, 23, is said to have witnessed her mother collapse into convulsions after smoking an unnamed sub-substance.

Moore was then rushed to the hospital, in a week that might otherwise have been devoted to celebrations of her third daughter Tallulah’s 18th birthday.

Frances Bean said of her mother, on whom she has served a restraining order: “She basically exists on ... Xanax, Adderall, Sonata and Abilify, sugar and cigarettes ... rarely eats ... often falls asleep in her bed while she is smoking, and I am constantly worried that she will start a fire (which she has done at least three times) that will threaten our lives.”

Not that Tinseltown fathers conduct them-them- selves any better. Paris Jackson, 13, has described the masks she was compelled to sport as a child by her superstar father Michael as “stupid”. TV star David Hasselhoff’s teenage daughter slapped him back to life after one of his many collapses through alcohol poisoning.

While, in a perfect example of dysfunctional parenting available on Youtube, actor Alec Baldwin aggressively threatened his “rude, thoughtless little pig” of a daughter for refusing to take his calls – which would have been characteristically comic had she not been 11 at the time.

Another day, another teenager on the receiving end of dubious parental life choices.

Moreover, it is notably the daughters rather than the sons of such miscreants who shoulder the burden in taking responsibility for their actions.

There is something in the adolescent female psyche that prides itself on being mature, on coping, on holding things together against the odds. I should know, because I was one. Not that my parents were drug-riddled maniacs. However, my mother once admitted that she always regarded me, the oldest of five, as an adult, even when I was a toddler. And, boy, did I act like it. One of the reasons I have chosen not to have children is that, ever since I turned 30, I’ve felt like one of those newly liberat-liberat- ed matriarchs who has ushered the offspring into adulthood and can get on with her own life.

The other reason is that parenting is a selfless, frequently menial act that I would not be terribly good at. This is a revelation that does not seem to occur to celebrities, who tend to regard their progeny as – at best – friends on whom to over-depend and – at worst – minor members of their entourage.

Thus, even “good” celeb parents (Madonna, Jerry Hall, Jade Jagger, the Duchess of York) socialise with their daughters, transforming them into a lesser mini-me.

Your child is not your friend; your child is your responsibility. While you may get top billing in your career, you cannot relegate your offspring to the status of bit players or emotional props.

I understand that suicide occurs at a point where no other option feels possible.

However, whether or not Houston took her own life, her actions have fundamentally endangered her daughter’s.

It is not the ailing, skeletal, ultimately selfindulgent Moore we should feel sympathy for, but the bitten-lipped Rumer – young, valiant, but unprotected. — The Daily Telegraph UK