When I was writing my article on I’m Glad my Mom Died, I could not help but notice a lot of similarities Jennette had with another child star who is also affiliated with Nickelodeon: Jojo Siwa! Both have overbearing mothers who chose this life for their daughters and are living vicariously through them. Unfortunately, moms like them are way more common in show business than anyone would like to admit. Let’s discuss the similarities between Jennette McCurdy and Jojo Siwa.
Their moms chose their lives for them
Jojo and Jennette never had a say in the kind of lives they would lead. Their moms had chosen it for them! Jojo’s mom had her life all mapped out before she was even born! As soon as she knew she was having a girl, according to Jessalyn, “She was gonna be a dancer, she was gonna wear bows and tutus, and she was gonna like it,” even though, when Jojo was little, she wanted to try out sports. As for Jennette, she was pushed into acting by her mother at the age of six due to her mom’s failed dreams of fame and determination to make her daughter a star. Due to her mom’s volatile nature and her feeling it was her job to keep her mom happy, she didn’t really feel like she could say no, even though she didn’t like acting and found it stressful and unpleasant. There was one thing Jennette did enjoy, however, and that was writing. However, her mom discouraged her from this because “writers dress frumpy and get fat” and Jennette would get a “big giant writer’s watermelon butt.” Jojo and Jennette’s moms didn’t care about who their daughters were as people, they just wanted to force their visions of their daughters onto them.
Their moms were living vicariously through them
The reason both Jojo and Jennette’s moms were so obsessed with projecting their visions of their daughters onto them was because they were both living out their failed dreams vicariously through their daughters. Jennette’s mom, Debra, wanted to be an actress when she was younger, but her parents wouldn’t allow it. As for Jessalyn, Jojo’s mom, according to her, she “only loved to dance” and “wanted to move to California and be a professional dancer.” According to Dating According to, “I really get the sense that there’s probably a part of (Jessalyn) that wishes she had more success than she did growing up, and so with Jojo, Jojo could become the epitome of that success that she’d always wanted.” The reason both Debra and Jessalyn wanted each of their daughters to go down their respective paths so badly was because they never got to fulfill their own dreams.
Their moms were obsessed with appearances
Another thing both girls have in common is that both of their moms were obsessed with and heavily involved in their daughters’ appearances. Ever since she was two years old, Jessalyn bleached Jojo’s hair (her actual hair color is brown). This is problematic because experts don’t recommend bleaching your child’s hair until after puberty, as children’s hair is more susceptible to damage. As for Jennette’s mom, well, that woman was on a whole other level. Jennette’s mom would tint Jennette’s eyelashes, use white strips on her teeth, and put highlights in her hair, from the time she was six years old. Not only that, but she showered Jennette until she was in her late teens. She did this sometimes because she wanted to make sure Jennette’s hair would look good for auditions. Both Debra and Jessalyn cared about their daughter’s appearances at the expense of their well-being.
Both Struggled to find their identity
Another way the two of them are similar is that both struggled to find their identity apart from their moms. Since Jennette’s identity was centered around being who her mom wanted her to be and keeping her mom happy, she had a really hard time figuring out who she was independent of her mom when her mom died. “If she’s really going to die, what am I going to do with myself?,” said Jennette, “My life’s purpose has always been to make Mom happy — So without Mom, who am I supposed to be now?”
Jennette said about finding her identity, “ I genuinely felt I had no identity without my mom. I didn’t know who I was. I felt terrified, incompetent, and incapable. Eventually, the process for me was realizing that those feelings were her conditioning. That was her voice, not mine.” When you are a parent, it is your job to make sure your child can survive and thrive in the world without you.
As for Jojo, she made a rather interesting remark on Exes and Ohs that felt similar to how Jennette’s remarks. She said that she could not do without her mom and said, “the day (she) dies is the day I disappear from the face of the earth.” While it is normal to be devastated by grief, you still need to have a life outside your parents and an identity outside of them too, especially as you develop your identity more and more. At the beginning of the podcast, in response to Shannon saying she was sure everyone knew Jojo Siwa, Jojo joked “I don’t, tell me who she is!” While she was joking, it is kind of sad when you think about it because Jojo never really had a chance to figure out who she is. Her mom always dictated who she was before she was even born. She never really had a chance to figure out her own interests apart from her mom.
One Major Difference
While Jennette has made the choice to get help and unlearn the toxic lessons her mom taught her, Jojo has not. While it is not easy to confront your trauma and learn not to make the mistakes of your parents, it is a choice. One that Jennette made and Jojo didn’t. However, it is not an easy choice. Jennette initially started therapy because her boyfriend discovered her ED and urged her to get help. However, she quit when her therapist told her that her mom’s treatment of her was abusive. Jennette said, “If my entire life and point of view and identity have been built on a false foundation, confronting that false foundation would mean destroying it and rebuilding a new foundation from the ground up.” This is why getting help can be so hard for people. You may discover that your entire worldview is wrong and built on lies. You may discover that your parents weren’t the people you needed them to be. You may learn that in order to heal, you need to completely destroy the foundation with which you navigated the world, and start over from scratch.
Nobody wants to hear that they wasted their entire lives believing a falsehood, or that their parents didn’t know or want what was best for them. So I can understand why Jennette struggled to come to terms with the truth. But you can either spend the rest of your life living a delusion that is comforting, but hurts you and doesn’t serve you, or you can begin to live the truth and start to live in a way that is authentic to who you are. Jennette was able to confront the reality of who her mom really was after she confronted her eating disorder with the help of an eating disorder specialist. “I think I needed to get that addiction under control before going anywhere near excavating the stuff from the past,” Jennette said. If you try to tackle all your issues at once, it can be overwhelming. When confronting your issues, it can help to take it one step at a time.
As for Jojo, it doesn’t appear that she has gotten professional help to help her unlearn the toxic ideals she has learned from her mother and the dance world. Unlike Jennette, she hasn’t had the opportunity to have space from her mom, which was what helped Jennette realize how toxic her relationship with her mom truly was, and also helped Jennette develop her own identity. And unlike Jennette, Jojo doesn’t seem to have realized or accepted how weird her relationship with her mom truly is. On Exes and Ohs, Jojo said “I’ve had a lot of people come into my life and be like ‘yo, your relationship with your mom is not normal’, and I’ll be like ‘yo, you just gotta go with it,’ because it’s not normal— but it’s our normal”. Dating According to said, “That is her brain trying to accept a terrible reality, which is, ‘my mom manipulated and used me ever since she got pregnant with me,’ so instead of being able to face that which would probably make any of us fall into a puddle of tears, she says it is what it is — it’s not normal but just gotta deal with it — and that’s not true but she’s making it true because it’s the only way she can survive what would inevitably be extreme pain.” It is clear that Jojo is in an environment that doesn’t really allow her to grow as a person, or heal from her pain.
The similarities between Jennette and Jojo’s mothers showcase the rather disturbing trend in entertainment of stage parents who are willing to sacrifice anything to get ahead, even if that “anything” is their child’s well-being, safety, or identity. The damaging effects of this trend are clear from both Jojo and Jennette’s stories and it is also clear that the industry rewards this exploitative behavior from parents. Parents need to think twice before putting their kids in the entertainment industry, and only do it if it’s truly what their child wants, not what their parent wants for them, and more importantly, view their children as their own person, with their own wants and needs and interests apart from them, rather than extensions of themselves.