I didn’t know Hayden Panettiere very well at all. Our paths crossed only briefly on a TV show and even more briefly at Los Angeles International Airport in 2005 or so, just before we worked together. I remember nodding at her and saying hi at a magazine shop.

I was traveling with my friend and fellow former child actor Anna Paquin. Anna asked later if I knew her. I didn’t, but I recognized her, or thought I did.

Whether from work or life, I couldn’t exactly say. She was traveling with what appeared to be a guardian. At around 15 years old, she was neither a kid nor a grown-up.

I recognized her in the poise, in that do-I-know-you-from-somewhere vagueness, in the ways that made us special and also not. She nodded and smiled back at me, but I didn’t know if she was just being polite or if she saw us the way we saw her, as fellow child actors. We might have worked on different sets, for different directors, in different eras, but we all bear the same recognizable wounds.

No matter how good the union safeguards get, no matter the policing of grooming behavior, none of it will change the fact that acting while so young strips us of our childhoods and leaves us to suffer the consequences — alone. The specifics may change, but the unethical cycle we’re stuck in will not. At least not until the industry, the audience and the culture recognize that we all partake in something extractive, exploitative and nonconsensual and do something about it.

Nearly 100 years ago, the United States largely banned child labor. No longer would we abide small children working in factories for long hours; we agreed children should be in school. What I experienced as a kid showed me that the laws that were supposed to protect me were less important than the need to finish a shoot day.

At 11, I began acting in TV movies in Toronto. Many of the experiences were magical, like singing with Naomi Judd or sitting in Sissy Spacek’s trailer while she played guitar. But the small budgets meant time was short.

Typically, shoots would last only four to six weeks, and every second counted. I was surrounded by adults, and the expectations remained those of a set, where the show must go on — child actor or not. On one job when I was 12 years old, I worked 12-hour days and learned what “working under the table” meant.

On days I was so sick that I could barely stand, I had a cot set up off camera where I could collapse between takes. Saying “no” could mean being labeled difficult to work with and potentially not being hired again. The qualities that make most child performers successful are the same ones that leave us vulnerable to exploitation: a desire to please, a desire for positive attention and, crucially, a desire to be thought of as mature beyond one’s years.

We’re too young to understand that the adults around us were kind to us in part to just finish a job, to get the scene, to sell a movie — that one of the most formative moments of our young lives was just a six-week blip in their lifelong careers. Our yearning for a maturity we do not yet have often means that too many decisions are left to us. In my case, the first decision was insisting that I wanted to act.

I loved pretending to be another person and to be put in fraught situations as someone else. There was a wonderful sense on a set that someone would tell you where to stand and what to say, and everyone would be deeply impressed by something that felt quite easy to me. I told myself then that I was grown-up enough to face the pressure.

I believed I could handle the constant rejection, the objectification, the ego-battering fact that I was constantly cast as the unattractive supporting characters (one named Chuckette, as in “upchuck.