Come by Chance

What ever happened to some of the first girls to grow up – and blow up – on the internet? In the late 2000s, YouTube gave rise to a new profession: kid-fluencer – kids making content for other kids, earning millions-strong audiences and massive paycheques. And for years, some of the most popular YouTube videos for girls lived on one channel: Seven Super Girls. It featured a rotating cast of tween and teen girls uploading sketches, skits and vlogs daily. Host Split Screen: There Goes My Childhood, Lauren White was one of them. Over time, they gained billions of views, big-name sponsors, lineups of screaming fans and more money than a child would know what to do with.But with their growing success, came new rules from the man in charge: their manager. He began as a mentor, a kind of father figure. Then, he began dictating how the girls had to look, dress and behave. Above all, they had to look as young as they could for as long as they could. And for years, the girls did as he said… until he was put behind bars for hurting one of their own.Almost a decade after the YouTube empire they built collapsed, the girls are now old enough to tell their own stories for the first time – the fame, the fortune, the friendships and the man they trusted for far too long.About Split Screen: Welcome to Split Screen, an examination of the utterly captivating, sometimes unsettling world of entertainment and pop culture. From reality TV gone awry, to the cult of celebrity, each season of Split Screen takes listeners on an evocative journey inside the world of showbiz. More episodes of There Goes My Childhood are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TGMCxCBC

How does it feel to find out you’ve lived another person’s life? Are the parents you thought you had no longer your parents? Those are the tough questions facing far too many children switched at birth — and they want accountability.

Another mother at another rural Newfoundland hospital has suspicions that the little girl she brought home isn’t her own. Over fifty years later, an online ancestry kit connects the dots and allows a mother and daughter to reunite.

It turns out this once in a lifetime mistake might not be so rare. A few months before Clarence and Craig were born at the Come By Chance hospital, a young mother named Muriel felt like the little baby boy she brought home from the hospital wasn’t her own.

As the Avery family mourns a devastating loss, Clarence Hynes resists their multiple appeals. But the cost of turning away becomes greater and greater for Clarence. The two families hurtle towards an inevitable truth.Note: This episode references suicide, please take care when listening.