Ariana Biermann and More Celeb Kids Who Financially Supported Parents

Ariana Biermann, Keke Palmer and Sydney Sweeney all revealed that their childhood earnings were used to keep their families afloat financially.

In the case of child actors or performers working in Hollywood, they are theoretically protected by the California Child Actor’s Bill a.k.a. The Coogan Bill. This 1939 law was created to safeguard young performers after former child actor Jackie Coogan’s mother and stepfather spent nearly all of his career earnings before he turned 18. Coogan’s Law set up court-monitored bank accounts that safeguard children’s earnings until they reach legal age. However, late Glee star Naya Rivera revealed that her family were able to get around restrictions on her bank account during tough times.

“As Dad’s stint of unemployment dragged on, I became the only one in the family who had any money … I didn’t have millions — more like tens of thousands — in my Coogan account, but these were dire times,” Rivera wrote in her memoir Sorry Not Sorry.

Other former child stars — like Sweeney — have confessed that they worked multiple jobs outside of entertainment from a young age to help their parents pay their bills during tough times.

Related: Celeb Kids Who've Roughed It Despite Rich Parents

While Hollywood is full of “nepo babies,” some celebrity kids paved their own path without the financial help of their wealthy parents. Madonna’s son David Banda raised eyebrows when he joked in July 2024 that he couldn’t afford food. “It’s lovely to experience it being nine o’clock at night, me being hungry and realizing that […]

Keep scrolling for a look back at some former child stars discussing how they became breadwinners for their families.

Ariana Zolciak, Brielle Zolciak and Kim Zolciak in November 2011. Prince Williams/FilmMagic

Ariana alleged in a June 2025 episode of Next Gen NYC that her mom Kim Zolciak and estranged stepfather Kroy Biermann “took my money” to pay household bills as they struggled financially. She said she didn’t speak to Zolciak for some time after finding out about her financial situation but insisted they’d now made amends.

“I just continue to build up and make my own money, support myself as being a 23-year-old and just continue to try to take every opportunity I can to build back up everything,” Ariana exclusively told Us Weekly in June 2025. “I think I’m the [most] financially stable I’ve ever been in my life, which is awesome. And my mom’s doing great too. She’s working really hard and has a lot of great things going for her, and my dad’s working too — so everything’s going in the right direction and moving forward.”

Ariana admitted she still has disagreements with her boyfriend Hudson McLeroy over lending money to her parents, yet she was determined not to let finances divide her family.

“I never want money to destroy a relationship with my family ever,” she told Us.

Jennette McCurdy and parents Debra and Mark McCurdy in August 2003. Mike Guastella/WireImage

The iCarly actress wrote extensively about her deeply troubled relationship with her late mother Debra McCurdy in her 2022 memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.

McCurdy shared during a 2022 appearance on Red Table Talk that Debra would use shame and verbal abuse to gain financial leverage over her. She read from an abusive email her mother once allegedly sent, where she asked for money after bombarding her with a litany of slut-shaming accusations.

“Dear Net, I am so disappointed in you,” her mother allegedly wrote. “You used to be my perfect little angel but now you are nothing more than a little slut, floozy, all used up.”

The horrific email accused her of being “a liar, conniving, evil [and an] ugly monster” for hiding that she was dating someone.

Related: Celebs Who've Said They Don’t Want Their Kids to Go Into Show Business

The entertainment industry was built on family legacies — from Drew Barrymore and her legendary acting dynasty to Miley Cyrus and her talented musical family. However, some stars want to avoid their children falling into the pitfalls of fame. After all, ‘nepo babies’ may start their careers with a foot forward based on their last […]

“You look pudgier too. It’s clear you are eating your guilt,” the email went on.

McCurdy revealed that Debra ended the email by insisting she “no longer” considered herself to be the Nickelodeon actress’ mother, yet still asked her to “send money for a new fridge.” McCurdy remembered taking her mother’s abusive insults to heart at first, but she later came to accept that her relationship with her mom was “really unhealthy.”

Debra died of cancer at age 56 in 2013.

Jessalynn Siwa and JoJo Siwa in October 2022. Momodu Mansaray/Getty Images

During a 2024 appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” Siwa said that, as her 18th birthday approached in 2021, her parents worried she’d abandon her family by taking all of her childhood earnings for herself.

“My parents thought when I turned 18, I was gonna get my Coogan account money, take all of my money, and have it all be mine … I was like, ‘I can give you so much reassurance, but I will never do that,’” she said of cutting off her loved ones.

Siwa said that her parents have “always” had a “fear” that they’d lose her financial support once she became an adult.

“Just because the opportunity of me leaving them high and dry was right there,” she said. “People have done it before. Child stars have done it before, but I would never do that to my family.”

KeKe Palmer with her mom Sharon Palmer in May 2015. Paras Griffin/Getty Images

When Keke started her acting career at age 10 with a breakout performance in Barbershop 2: Back in Business, her parents Sharon and Larry tried to balance their own full-time jobs while supporting her acting career.

Unfortunately, it eventually became too difficult for her parents to juggle all of their responsibilities so Keke became the breadwinner for her family.

“Ultimately, what happened is that it just hit a point where my dad could no longer do a job because if he did a job, then there would be nobody to take care of my older sister and my younger siblings because my mom was always with me,” she explained to The Los Angeles Times in 2023.

Keke described an unusual dynamic developing within her family where she became responsible for keeping everyone afloat financially while still a teen.

Related: Why Jeff Goldblum Won't Financially Support His Kids When They Grow Up

Daniel Craig, Ashton Kutcher and more celebrity parents have decided not to leave their children with trust funds. “Isn’t there an old adage that if you die a rich person, you’ve failed?” Craig told Candis in an August 2021 interview. “I think Andrew Carnegie gave away what in today’s money would be about 11 billion dollars, […]

“It was like, all of our roles were switched,” she remembered. “I became the financial breadwinner because my career was bringing in the most money, and my parents wanted to support me, but they couldn’t have their own jobs because their own jobs would not even allow them to really be able to sustain a stable household.”

The Nope star said she started to “feel pressure” about continuously lining up new acting jobs so her family could pay their bills.

“I started to realize that I was the financial breadwinner, and that if I didn’t have a job, who would have a job? Or how could my parents have a job? Or how could we sustain the same lifestyle even if they did have a job? ” she recalled. “Because I was making the kind of money that many people never make. It put us in a crazy position.”

Naya Rivera in July 2013. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

The late Glee star wrote in her 2016 memoir Sorry Not Sorry that she dipped into her modest earnings from her childhood acting work multiple times to support her family. She recalled there were occasions where her family had “literally no money coming in” besides her earnings.

“As Dad’s stint of unemployment dragged on, I became the only one in the family who had any money .. .I didn’t have millions — more like tens of thousands — in my Coogan account, but these were dire times,” she recalled.

“There was literally no money coming in at all, so over the next few years, my mom and I made two court visits to request a withdrawal from my account. I’d miss the first few hours of class, and we’d go to court and stand in front of a judge to petition for permission.”

She went on, “’Your honor,’ my mom would say, ‘this is my daughter and she has X amount of money in an account that I protect, but recently our family has fallen on hard times. We would like to withdraw $2,000 from the account to cover us for the next month. My husband is currently looking for work, and I have two other children to take care of.’ The judge would listen, and then ask me if I was OK with the idea. I always said yes.”

Rivera’s parents later discovered their daughter was able to file for unemployment benefits as a working actor between booking jobs.

“[Unemployment] brought in another $700 every two weeks, in checks made out to me that my parents cashed, so for about three years, from the time I was 15 until I was a senior in high school, I was almost always financially helping my family in some way,” she wrote. “I felt like it wasn’t just my career riding on every audition, but potentially the roof over my family’s head.”

Dylan and Cole Sprouse with their mother/manager, Melanie, in 2000. Maureen Donaldson/Online USA, Inc.

Cole confirmed during a 2023 interview on “Call Her Daddy” that his mother Melanie Wright started sending him and twin brother Dylan on acting auditions when they were just 8 months old. The twins worked steadily throughout their childhood, with Cole playing Ross Geller’s son Ben on Friends and the siblings costarring in 87 episodes of the Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack and Cody by the time they were teenagers.

“[Acting] started really as a means to put bread on the table,” Cole told host Alex Cooper. “It also allowed my mother, at the same time, to be a mother but to make her main focus and her job [be] our careers.”

He went on, “I think there’s two types of kids within the child acting business — the thespian children that choose to do it and there’s the working class kids that, in our case at least, twins are a great labor exploit. Babies can only work for a certain amount of hours so you can double the time if you have two of them that look identical.”

Cole looked back at his child acting as “the golden ticket from Willy Wonka” and a “great means to an end” for his family. Dylan and Cole’s parents Matthew and Melanie split when they were less than one year old, and Matthew was eventually awarded custody of his sons before they were cast in Suite Life.

“When my father was given forced custody, we had pretty much lost everything from the youngest parts of our career,” Cole said in his “Call Her Daddy” interview. “That would be Friends and Big Daddy. My mother was an incredibly wonderful and artistic woman, but she was financially the most irresponsible woman ever.”

Cole insisted he held no grudges against his mother for their family’s financial instability.

Sydney Sweeney in June 2025. Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

After starting her acting career at age 11, Sweeney’s entire family moved from Washington to Los Angeles. This life-changing decision was financially crippling for Sweeney’s parents, as they lost their home in Washington and struggled to even make ends meet in L.A.

“I watched my parents lose a lot,” she said. “We filed for bankruptcy, and they lost their house back home on the lake. We couldn’t afford life in L.A. We couldn’t afford life anywhere.”

Sweeney resorted to taking side jobs as a babysitter, cleaned restaurant bathrooms and even worked as a Universal Studios tour guide to keep her family afloat.

“It was hard because they were supporting my dream, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” she told Women’s Health in 2023. “I didn’t want to fail them. No matter how long it took, I was going to be in a TV show or a movie, and I wasn’t going to stop until something happened.”

Brooke Shields and mom Teri Shields in 1989. Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images

Shields became the youngest fashion model to ever appear on a Vogue cover at age 14 in 1980 and had her first leading movie role in The Blue Lagoon that same year. She shared in the 2023 documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields that her late mother Teri Shields routinely used her childhood earnings to support their lifestyle.

“[She’d say], ‘If we get this job, we don’t have to live in our little apartment anymore’ … [or] ‘If we get this job, we can go buy a new car,’” Brooke remembered.

In the documentary, Brooke explained that she realized from a young age that her earnings were keeping her family together while her mom battled alcoholism.

“I felt such a responsibility to keep her alive. My life depended on it, so I thought. You know, you just keep the peace,” she said. “You never know what to expect with an alcoholic. It wasn’t abusive, but it was emotionally abusive because I felt sort of abandoned every time she wasn’t herself.”

Teri died at age 79 in 2012 of dementia complications.

Leighton Meester in March 2025. Jacopo Raule/Getty Images

The former Gossip Girl actress filed a lawsuit against her mother and former manager Constance Meester in 2011 over allegations that Constance misused the $7,500 she sent monthly for her brother’s medical bills.

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Constance responded with a $3 million countersuit, claiming that Leighton failed to deliver on a contractual agreement to pay her $10,000 a month for support. She insisted she was owed financial support from Leighton because she “sacrificed her happiness” to manage her daughter’s acting career, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Constance withdrew her countersuit in December 2011 and indicated to a Los Angeles County Superior Court that she no longer wished to pursue any litigation against her daughter. As a result, Leighton was granted a default judgement that specified she was under no contractual obligation to pay her mother a monthly stipend.

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