Topics: Brooke Shields, Celebrity, Parenting, Mental Health
Pretty Baby actor Brooke Shields has spoken out about how her mom agreed for her to pose for Playboy when she was just 10 years old.
Most younger people now will likely know Shields for her appearances in titles like Friends or That 70s Show, rom-com Chalet Girl or Netflix's recent movie, Mother of the Bride.
However, the 59-year-old has been in the entertainment industry for decades, and earned her first acting credits in the 1970s, before she was even a teenager.
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She got work with the help of her mom at the time, but it wasn't just acting in movies and TV shows that Shields found herself doing as a child.
When she was 10 years old, Shield's mom, Teri, agreed that she could pose completely nude for a photoshoot for the Playboy publication, Sugar and Spice.
She had her makeup done and appeared full-frontal, all at an age long before she would be considered an adult.
In 2014, two years after the death of her mother, Shields looked back at her relationship with her mom in a book titled In There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.
Shields opened up about her mom, but in an interview with The Times last year she admitted there were still things she held back.
She breezed over the Playboy incident in the book, telling The Times: “It was too much for me to cop to that, really. Writing about it just broke me. It was her that I was protecting.”
Though Shields has agreed it was her mom's job to 'protect' her as a child, she said she wasn't angry with her mom for the decisions she'd made in the past.
“Everyone wanted me to be angry with her, but anger was just too sad for me to take when I looked at how insecure she was,” she explained.
Last year, Shields shared more details about her life in a documentary titled Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby.
In looking back at her life, she said: “That made me look at what kind of person I am and to give myself a little credit.
"I had to contend with so much at such an early age, and there was resilience, but also I put on blinders as a defence mechanism. But now I can look at that little girl and think, ‘She did it, she pulled through.’ ”
If you’ve been affected by any of these issues and want to speak to someone in confidence regarding the welfare of a child, the Childhelp USA National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453) operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and receives calls from throughout the United States, Canada, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico.
