I have seen how kids that age are trained to be acrobats. When I was in the circus a few of the circus families had 2 of the Russian acrobats training their girls. These kids were 5-6 years old. The trainers would put the kids in extremely deep stretches and stand on them while the kids screamed bloody murder. I am confident what I saw was exponentially worse than what is in the video with Ito.
Some parents try to live vicariously through their kids. Try and get their kids to do all the things they had hoped they would be able to do. Some parents try to monetize their kids.
Any time you see a childhood actor on a TV show or in a movie, there is at least a decent amount of this in the background.
Kids being challenged and allowed to step up to challenges, I think that can be good. Kids being forced or coerced into it, not so good. There is a fine line. In this video, the parent does not seem to be the problem. The guy on the other side of the table was scaring the kid. He knew it. And as soon as he saw it was working, he did it every chance he got.
If the parent was thinking straight, he may have gone over to the guy and said, "any more of that behavior after the points and you are going to have some problems." He may have gone to the show hosts and said the same. It was fine to console his kid. But without making it so the guy behaved civilly, the situation turned into something I don't think the parent wanted or anticipated. And the hosts of the show should really have been on top of what the guy was doing given the age and fragility of Ito.
And it isn't like their audience was entertained in a positive way by the guy making Ito cry.
When my kid was little, my wife would stop me from stepping in when the kids would cause problems with each other. She would watch and see if they could work it out. If things got out of hand, then one of us would try and bring some sense of order. The response needed to be fair to both kids. But there were a few times when an adult stepped in and treated my kid unfairly. You better believe, I did not let that go. In this instance, the parent and the hosts of the show really should have dealt with the guy ASAP. Nobody looked good as a result of him making Ito cry.
But, I am going to venture a guess that, if the parents had predicted that this guy would behave in a way that scared their kid and made her cry, they probably would have taken a pass on this appearance.
One thing that makes me think this is not fully on the parents even if they did not address the issue properly as it unfolded is, Ito likely would not be together and successful if her parents showed a consistent pattern of causing situations like this one for their kid. If the kid consistently suffered emotional abuse as a result of the parents, no matter how much talent, she would not be quite where she is.
Like, a lot of those childhood actors who are extremely successful as kids but pushed in an abusive way, they become totally messed up human beings by the time they are young adults. Drugs, depression, etc. Child prodigy athletes have the same happen no matter how good they are. Ito doesn't seem to suffer from inner demons in that way. At least, not as far as I can tell.
But the issue is rampant even in circumstances when it cannot be seen.
