Child and Teen Résumés — What Must Never Be On Them
Almost everything in this section applies to a child’s résumé unchanged. But four things must come off it, for reasons that have nothing to do with casting and everything to do with the fact that this piece of paper gets handed to strangers, photocopied, and left on tables in rooms nobody is watching.
Start with the physical reality of the document, because every rule below follows from it.
A résumé is not a private record. It is printed. It is handed across a table to somebody you have never met. It is photocopied and passed to people you will never meet. It is left in piles in rooms that empty out at six o’clock. It can be photographed on a phone in two seconds by anybody standing near it.
For an adult, that is a manageable risk. For a nine-year-old, it is the entire question.
The four things that must never appear
1. The home address. Never. Not the street, not the postcode, not the town if the town is small. This is standard advice for every actor — Acting Studio Chicago says there is no need for an address on any acting résumé — and for a child it stops being style advice and becomes safeguarding.
And there is a striking piece of corroboration from inside the industry itself: Actors Access does not give casting directors an actor’s physical address at all. Its own documentation: “For your security, your physical address and email address are not provided to casting.” The largest submission platform in America has decided that a performer’s home address is not something a casting office needs to have. Take the hint.
2. The school name. Never. A school name, plus a photograph, plus a first name, is enough for a stranger to find a child on a Tuesday afternoon.
This is our reasoning, not an industry rule — we could not source it to any industry body, and we are telling you that rather than dressing it up. It is nonetheless correct, and we would far rather state safeguarding logic plainly than pretend a trade publication said it for us.
It creates one practical wrinkle, and the fix is simple: a school production is still a credit. You list it without naming the school. “School production” in column three is honest, informative, and gives away nothing. Nobody is fooled, and nobody is endangered.
3. The child’s own phone number or email address. Never. Guardian contact only — and the document should use the word “guardian” explicitly, so that anybody who picks it up knows within three seconds that they are dealing with a minor and that an adult stands between them and this child. That word is doing real work. Do not delete it to save a line.
4. The date of birth and the physical stats — and this one is genuinely contested, so here is the argument in full.
The date-of-birth problem, argued honestly
The case for putting it on. Backstage, via manager Cathryn Hartt, lists “date of birth (for anyone under 18)” as a standard résumé item. And the reason underneath it is completely real: a child’s exact age determines their permitted working hours, their schooling requirements and their permit status. Productions genuinely need that number. It is not idle curiosity — it is a legal input.
The case against. A date of birth on a circulating document, sitting beside a photograph and a first name, is a piece of identifying information about a child that is now loose in the world and cannot be recalled.
This is our synthesis, not a quote, and we are labelling it as ours because nobody else makes the distinction cleanly.
The date of birth belongs on the paperwork — the work permit, the contract, the guardian’s forms, the trust account. Every one of those travels directly to production, under controlled conditions, to named people, for a stated purpose.
The résumé travels everywhere. It is the least controlled document in the entire process.
So: playing-age range on the résumé. Exact date of birth on the paperwork. The production loses nothing — they will have the real number in their hands long before the child works a single hour. And the piece of paper that gets left on the table has one less thing on it.
The same logic prunes the stats. An adult’s résumé lists height, hair and eyes because casting is physical and those facts are load-bearing. A child’s résumé lists a current height — because a child grows — and a playing-age range, and then it stops. Weight does not belong on a child’s résumé. Neither does anything else that reads like a measurement of a body. The industry is already arguing about whether these belong on adult résumés at all — Chapter VII has that argument — and for a minor, the argument resolves itself.
A correct child’s résumé
Here is Maya Reeves, aged eleven — invented, like her brother Jordan, along with every credit and teacher below her. She has never been paid to act. This résumé is completely correct, and what makes it correct is mostly what is not on it.
MAYA REEVES
GUARDIAN CONTACT: Sarah Reeves (mother) · +44 7700 900xxx
maya.reeves.acting@[domain]
(all correspondence via guardian)
Playing Age: 9–13 Height: 4'6" (as of June) Non-Union
Hair: Dark Brown Eyes: Hazel Based: Manchester
THEATRE
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
MATILDA JR. Lavender Salford Youth Theatre
dir. Rebecca Sallow
A CHRISTMAS CAROL Tiny Tim Salford Youth Theatre
dir. Callum Ives
THE WIZARD OF OZ Munchkin / School production
Ensemble
TRAINING
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Acting for Young People Salford Youth Theatre — Saturday programme
(ongoing, 2 years)
Ballet RAD Grade 4 (working toward Grade 5)
Singing Nadia Brandt — private tuition (ongoing)
SPECIAL SKILLS
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
ACCENTS: Manchester (native*), RP
LANGUAGES: Polish (fluent — spoken at home), English (native)
MUSIC: Piano (Grade 3) · Sings — soprano, can sight-read
PHYSICAL: Gymnastics (British Gymnastics Level 4, 4 yrs) · Swimming
(competent, 25m) · Rides a bike, no stabilisers
OTHER: Comfortable around dogs · Reads aloud fluently
* = native accent
No professional credits to date.Look at what is not there. No address. No school name — the school production is listed as “School production,” which is honest and tells a casting office everything it actually needs. No date of birth. No weight. No phone number belonging to an eleven-year-old. Nothing on that page lets a stranger who picks it up off a table find a child.
And look at what is there — because the special skills section on a child’s résumé is disproportionately powerful. A child who genuinely does gymnastics at a graded level, or genuinely speaks Polish at home, is not a nice-to-have. She is a casting solution. Jackie Reid, a children’s manager, on the record: if “your child has a special skill—like are fluent in Spanish or are a brown belt in Karate—put that down.”
And the last line does the hardest work on the page. “No professional credits to date.” Stated once, without apology, without padding, without a single invented job. That is a completely respectable position for an eleven-year-old to be in — and pretending otherwise is where the damage starts.
The header that gets it wrong
Same child. Same career. This header appears, in some form, on a great many templates aimed at parents — and it should appear on none of them.
Maya Reeves
17 Wellfield Road, Chorlton, Manchester M21 xxx
DOB: 3 February 2015 (age 11)
Weight: 5st 2lb
maya.reeves2015@[domain] · 07700 900xxx
St. Bede’s Primary School, Chorlton
CREDITS
2024 Featured Extra — CASUALTY WARD (BBC) — hospital drama, 3 days on set
2023 The Wizard of Oz — Munchkin — St. Bede’s Primary School- The full home address of a child, printed on a document that gets handed to strangers, photocopied and left on tables.
- The exact date of birth, sitting beside a photograph and a name. The production does need this number — but they get it on the permit, not here.
- The child’s weight. There is no casting reason for it and no version of it that is appropriate on a circulating document about a minor.
- An email address and a phone number that appear to belong to the child herself, with no indication anywhere that a guardian exists.
- The birth year hidden inside the email address — the leak almost nobody thinks about, and it survives every other correction on this list.
- The primary school, named in full. School name, plus photograph, plus first name, is enough to find a child on a weekday afternoon.
- “Featured Extra” — the single worst line on any acting résumé, and one that teaches a child to inflate before she has been paid once.
- The school production names the school a second time in the credit line, when “School production” would have done the same job and given away nothing.
On that seventh error, briefly, because parents feel the pull of it hardest and it feels like advocacy: “Featured Extra.”
A child who spent a day as background on a television drama had a wonderful day and learned what a set is. That day is not a credit — and writing it up as one teaches a child, before they have even started, that this is an industry where you exaggerate. Spotlight will not accept extra work as a qualifying credit at all. Chapter XIV is the full argument, and it applies to an eleven-year-old exactly as it applies to a thirty-year-old.
What we are not going to teach you
Three things sit adjacent to this page that matter enormously — and we are going to flag them and then stop. They are not résumé questions, and anybody who tells you they can cover child labour law in a paragraph is lying to you. We are not lawyers. Nothing here is legal advice.
Coogan accounts (US). California’s Child Actor’s Bill — the Coogan Law — requires that a percentage of a minor performer’s earnings be placed in a blocked trust the child can access at eighteen. Other states have equivalents. We are not printing percentages or thresholds, because we did not verify them and they change. Read Backstage’s explainer, and then talk to a production accountant.
Work permits. Most US jurisdictions require a child performer work permit. New York runs its own scheme; Texas runs its own authorisation. And here is the rule that catches families out: it depends on the state you SHOOT in, not the state you live in. We did not verify the details state by state and this page will not pretend to. Go to the labour department of the state in question.
Spotlight young performers (UK). This one is a real gate, and British parents routinely do not know it exists: a young performer cannot self-join Spotlight. In Spotlight’s own words, “A young performer wishing to join Spotlight must be represented by an agent, and the agency should be registered with Spotlight.” Full parental consent is required. You cannot simply pay and appear.
Parents of child actors are the single most targeted group in this industry, and the rule that protects you is short enough to memorise.
No legitimate agent or manager charges you a fee to represent your child. They take a commission from work the child books. Money flows TO the performer. If money is flowing FROM you, that is not an agent.
SAG-AFTRA publishes its own red flags: you should never pay for a job; being asked to contribute to travel or upfront costs is a warning sign; and any email from a SAG-AFTRA representative comes from the sagaftra.org domain — never a personal address. There is a live, documented scam in which fraudsters impersonate real, named casting directors using AI; in one reported case a fake “SAG-AFTRA representative” directed an actor to pay a union initiation fee into a personal checking account. Watch also for agencies that make representation contingent on buying headshots from their photographer.
Report to info@sagaftra.org and to ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
A résumé is not a work permit. A résumé is not a trust account. A résumé is not consent. It is one page of facts about a child — and the most responsible thing you can do with it is make it accurate, keep it current, and take off it everything a stranger could use.
That is the end of the section. Chapter I is where it starts, and Chapter II is the template — free, nothing to sign up for, exactly as it should be.
Want Will to Coach You Through It?
Reading is one thing. Working 1-on-1 with a working actor who booked Oppenheimer is another.