What the question should make us ask is not whether the difficulty was necessary to produce the person, but whether we — as a society, as an industry, as the audience that paid to watch a seven-year-old perform — did right by the child we were benefiting from. The answer to that question, clearly, is that we did not. The various institutions and individuals who had responsibilities for Drew Barrymore’s welfare and failed in those responsibilities produced genuine harm to a real child.
The fact that she went on to build something remarkable from the wreckage of her childhood is to her credit. It does not discharge anyone else’s.
The judge in California in 1989 asked whether she was ready for a future that could not be reversed. She said yes. She has been living that irreversible future, with all its difficulty and all its richness, for more than thirty-five years. The question she answered that day turned out to be much larger than either of them probably knew.
She answered it anyway, and she has been answering it every day since.
## The Institutions That Did and Didn’t Show Up
Looking back at Drew Barrymore’s early years with the perspective that time and research afford, it becomes possible to identify the various institutions that should have provided protection and did not, and the few individuals and informal networks that provided something more valuable in their absence.
The entertainment industry that employed her from infancy was, as noted, primarily oriented around extracting commercial value from her presence. This was not malicious in any individual sense; it was simply the logic of the industry. The people who cast her and worked with her were, in most cases, acting in good faith within a system that had not designed children’s welfare into its structures. Spielberg’s evident affection for her and his role as her godfather represent a genuine human connection within that system — one that produced both real care and the occasional quilt-and-note intervention — but it was a personal relationship, not an institutional one.