It's a story that's been told a million times, a tale everyone knows by heart. The path of reality show children, thrust into the spotlight and onto television screens by their fame-hungry or naive, or sometimes both, parents.
There's the gradual rise, while America gets to know these children who are now part of pop culture, and then the skyrocketing fame, the plateau so small it barely registers, and then a big fall. The fall is what we know as the reality kids curse.
History tells us that it's all but impossible to cast kids in a reality show without something going horribly wrong. Just look at the Duggars, or Teen Mom, or any of the Real Housewives. Trouble befalls families who turn their lives over to the entertainment-industrial complex, and it hits the kids the hardest. So when a pair of sisters are practically raised in front of the ever-present cameras, growing up among a production crew and playing out every transition and awkward year with a side of glam squad a healthy dose of confessional, manage to avoid all the pitfalls, it's worth a case study.
The sisters are, for all intents and purposes, clean as a whistle. They've built successful careers and businesses, own their own property and have even resisted that often irresistible urge to start a spin off reality show. That in and of itself deserves a medal.
Their friends were from the neighborhood, not Hollywood, and Caitlyn led carpool after carpool after carpool. They even had (gasp!) the occasional chore. Special credit is due to the late Robert Kardashian, whose main fatherly focus was keeping his children grounded and fully aware of their privilege at every step—it gave the second-round Kardashian family a legacy to live up to.
"I feel like a lot of people say that kids who grow up in that world go crazy," Kendall said to Harper's Bazaar. "But it has everything to do with how your parents raise you. I was raised so normally, or as normally as I could have been."
Kendall and Kylie took notes and learned how not to make the same mistakes. It was like a blueprint for what not to do—when you've seen the repercussions of excess firsthand, you develop an aversion to it, repelled by the consequences or backlash or simply the hangover.
They know that to keep living the life they have become accustomed to, they have to put in the time. Say what you will about putting a young child through the rigors of a sometimes-grueling production schedule that befits a reality show, but, at least for the Kardashian-Jenners, it conveyed the concept that you wake up every morning to create, to do, to check off lists. There's no lounging around and expecting Mom to buy you your Birkins.
(They're still welcome to, of course, it's just they'll sit on a closet shelf alongside Birkins the girls bought for themselves.)
What makes her tick is her day job, and it's been a driving force for a long time now. "She had her eyes focused on exactly what she wanted to do," sister Kim Kardashian explained to Vogue. "And she made it happen."
"I day dream about when I can get to a place in my life where I can be off the radar," she once told Paper.
Whether that comes to fruition isn't for us to say, but there's a wholly different result when someone has fame but doesn't need it, than when they don't have it yet crave it desperately.
Kendall operates a version of this mindset, achieved by keeping an airtight inner circle. "I'm not sure open to new people," she explained to Harper's Bazaar. "I have a small group of people I trust. I'm very intuitive, so I'm good at feeling out how people are, if they have bad intentions."
They've benefited from the lack of turmoil, and there's something to be said for the never-wavering love beaming down on them from all sides of the clan. Does that mean Kris Jenner discovered the secret? Probably not, but it's as close as anyone is going to get.
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