The Gap has a sign in their window that reads, “Your Kid Could Be Our Next Star.” “Ugh,” I thought when I saw it on my way in to shop for jeans. Is that even a selling point?

It should have said, “Your kid could be our next star with their very own chance to be exploited, eaten up, and then spit-out as soon as they are determined less than profitable by the very industry that gave them a pass. Don’t forget, they will be sure to receive everything from unfavorable criticism to downright nasty ridicule by the media, bloggers, comedians, and fans, along with cruel judgments from people who have never even met them. As a parent, you’ll get the added bonus of a fast buck, likely divorce, and your very own opportunistic opportunity to cry on the set of ‘The View’ with Joy Behar sitting beside you (or worse, confessing into Billy Bush’s mic on ‘Entertainment Tonight’). If all goes as planned, you’ll eventually be totally estranged from the very child that you wanted to make into a star.”

I guess there wasn’t enough room on the window for my truth in advertising soliloquy, but I thought about it the entire time I was trying on jeans.

There’s a lot of talk about how we value children, but it kind of feels hollow when you watch television. “Our kids come first,” comments sound like when I say that I want to go to the gym. I really want to do what’s right and work-out every day, but often times I flake and order carry-out on my way home instead. I talk a good game, but there is not a lot of substance. In the same way, we may say we value children, but there are still a whole lot of open casting calls awaiting the next Lindsey Lohan-kid or Gosselin-family.

My internal rant on childhood stardom happened the day before the horrifying balloon story was aired on every news channels available. The video showed the silver balloon zipping through the sky with captions like, “Six-year old boy trapped in balloon.” Now we know that the story was most likely a hoax. Already this week, CNN reported that the parents of the 6-year-old boy, Richard and Mayumi Heene, are likely to face criminal charges.

The Heene parents are no strangers to cheap fame. Previously, they had appeared on “Wife Swap,” a reality show that takes two completely opposite-type families and switches the moms to see how each family will fare (and fail) under the guidance of the new mother-bear.

While my viewing of this show has been limited, I have seen enough to know that it is child abuse. The families often have young children — kids who are not old enough to process the difference between their life and what’s being done to them for ratings. Just because no one is putting the kids on this show in physical harm, doesn’t mean that they are not negatively affected by the camera crews and producers encouraging the dads to fight with the new live-in women “pretending” to be mom.

And while I have tried my best to boycott the entire escapade that has become the Gosselin fiasco, I can’t talk about childhood neglect and abuse on television without mentioning the most famous broken-family of the day. Is there really anyone who would argue that it was BEST for the kids to keep the cameras rolling when this publicized divorce got nastier than any soap-opera break-up?

If TLC valued children, especially the children that are part of the TLC broadcasting family, the “Jon & Kate + Eight” crew would have packed up and went home as soon as the parents split. Instead, shows kept being taped as TLC continues to reap all the benefits and ghastly profits from the free tabloid and talk show publicity of their biggest stars.

It used to be that the only children ruined by television were the child actors whose parents had fed them to wolves for a chance to be a sitcom star. The cast of “Different Strokes” were literally the poster-kids for what could happen if you entered the industry before you (or your legal team) could act on your behalf.

Now days, it appears that the professional child actors landing actual acting roles are the only ones practicing with a safety net. It’s the amateurs with parents looking for a quick trip to celebrity-ville who are obviously in need of protection.

Conditions have to be severe before children are removed from their homes. Nadya Suleman still has all 14 of her kids after her media blitz; Jon and Kate still see all six of their children every other week; and Richard and Mayumi Heene will get to keep the son they allegedly made stay in the attic while search teams plowed the ground looking for him.

Exploiting your children is not always illegal. And I don’t necessarily believe that children should be removed from their home even if the people in charge of the home are making less then credible parenting decisions. But, there has to be a better way to protect children of parents who are willing to do almost anything to get on television. Maybe they could be assigned a live-in social-worker that would have to grant approval before any camera crew showed up. Or, better yet, we could institute a law that forbid the parents (and their children until they were of a consenting age) from being filmed ... ever. If we can take Pete Rose out of the game, surely we could take Richard Heene out of the public eye?

Amy Gesenhues is a freelance writer who lives in Floyd County. You can read her daily commentaries at www.AmyWroteIt.Wordpress.com. E-mail her directly at amy@amywroteit.com.