Getting your child or baby into modeling

I recently talked to my friend Dee who has a 5 year old son named Chris. Chris in the last 4 years has done 3 commercials, 1 of which was a national commercial and countless catalog and magazine ads.

Knowing there are so many parents who would love to modeling and kids casting calls">get their own babies or children into modeling and acting, I asked Dee for her advise.

A large hurdle to overcome when trying to get your baby into modeling is finding out where to start or what to do, I mean where do you find kids casting calls?. The best place to begin is with research. Googling the words auditions, modeling, acting, etc. will give you some great results and many resources for child actors.

Baby gap ad

Dee also mentions to make sure you do not get caught in some of the scams out there. Dee tells me when she was first looking for agencies she picked up the phone and called around. All these agencies sounded excited and invited them to come in. Once there they tried to sell her portfolio packages for many thousands of dollars before they would ever consider helping her find auditions. Basically you had to pay them thousands without any guarantee that they will ever do anything.

Not having thousands to waste, Dee took some pictures of Chris with her digital camera and created an online modeling portfolio for her child at Exploretalent.com. Exploretalent is a service for the acting and modeling community that gives aspiring models a place to add an online portfolio that casting agents look through. Exploretalent also lists a database of every modeling and acting job available and searchable by location. Exploretalent.com has 2 levels of service, a free portfolio and acting gig search and a paid custom search feature which allows you to be your own casting agent and submit your portfolio directly to the listed job.

With an online portfolio and a huge list of acting and modeling jobs for her baby, Dee began looking around. Pretty soon she was comfortable with the submission process and began submitting Chris to the auditions herself.

Her submissions started bringing responses from interested parties and pretty soon Dee and Chris had a full schedule of casting calls and auditions to go to weekly.

Dee explained that spending thousands is not always needed when much of the work can be done yourself with the help of online research and access to the right casting database such as the ones at auditions.com and exploretalent.

Here are some great ads with baby and child models