Every day, on sets around the world, children are asked to perform scenes of grief, violence, terror and loss. They are directed by adults, surrounded by crew, and expected to deliver emotionally raw performances - often without any specialist support mitigating the performances or cost of this experience. There are permits that govern their working hours, chaperones who manage their breaks and meals, tutors who school them, but there is almost no dedicated infrastructure to protect their psychological and developmental safety while performing traumatic content.

This is the gap the Young Performer Support Specialist (YPS) was designed to fill.

The urgency is neurological as much as ethical. A child's bodymind cannot always distinguish performed trauma from lived experience. When a young performer is asked (or tricked) to embody fear, grief or violence (and is directed using adult techniques in an adult environment), the emotional and psychological risk is real, whether or not it's visible on set. The industry has recognised that child actors are drowning for years. What it has lacked is a tested, practical response

Safe Sets has been meticulously designing that response since 2020. After years of protocol development and successful implementation on South African soil, local and international alike, we can now say with confidence: the YPS works. Productions that have used the role report that it doesn't slow things down or complicate the director's vision. It enhances performance, reduces risk, and ensures young performers leave the set inspired and intact. The response from production companies was immediate and clear: this role belongs on set and productions began booking YPS days alongside IC days as standard practice.

Who is the YPS?

A YPS supports the entire production cycle, from script breakdown and pre-production planning through to post-shoot check-ins, with one specific focus: ensuring that emotionally challenging, vulnerable or traumatic content is navigated safely and creatively for the young performer.

A YPS is a creative collaborator who sits at the intersection of four disciplines:

• Performance collaborator: working alongside the director to achieve authentic, truthful performances from young performers.

• Consent advocate: managing the complex and ongoing process of obtaining genuine assent from a young performer.

• Safeguarding Specialist: responsible for ensuring the set is both physically and psychologically safe at every stage.

• Trauma-Informed Practitioner: present not to treat trauma, but to prevent it; identifying risk early and diffusing it through purposeful play and step-in/step-out protocols before harm takes hold.

What separates the YPS from most other safeguarding crew members, is their specialisation in performance architecture. Performance architecture is the meticulous design of embodied performance elements that resonates with the unique developmental patterns of the specific young performer, simultaneously safeguarding the performer and elevating the nuanced creativity of the storytelling. Performances architectured for the camera.

It is worth being precise about where the role begins and ends, because these distinctions matter. The YPS, as an entity separate from the following, is not a:

• Therapist - rather, the YPS can be seen as a first responder who is trauma informed and can sidestep or diffuse harmful experiences, and will refer the young performer to a therapist when incidents occur. The YPS can suggest therapist assessments when necessary, and implement therapist notes as an active collaborator with the therapist.

• Chaperone or Child Minder - while the chaperone/child minder might look after the young performer's practical and personal needs, the YPS becomes a third-party resource to support vulnerable content. Within the complexity of the chaperone/child minder's work they might flag content, but practically implementing embodied consensual performance elements during vulnerable content fall outside of their scope.

• Tutor - The YPS does not take responsibility for the young performer's schooling, but might collaborate with the tutor to suggest character development, storyline appropriate material or deroling elements to integrate into the curriculum.

• Acting coach: Although the YPS is trained in acting coaching for young performers, they do not oversee the overall character development, voice and accent work, line delivery, character embodiment or performance. The YPS directly collaborates with the acting coach to specifically design the embodied consent, performance architecture and performance design for highly vulnerable, emotional or violent content through purposeful play. This is similar to how an intimacy coordinator or stunt coordinator might assist the acting coach or director as a third party.

• Intimacy Coordinator: Although the YPS role was developed by IC's, the YPS isn't necessarily an IC (but can be). While the YPS does provide coordination support and practical performance design for vulnerable content, they will need to collaborate with an IC for any sexual intimacy, kissing, body contact or nudity.

Perhaps most importantly: the YPS role is defined by its focus, not just by who holds it. A practitioner may well be a trained IC, a therapist, or an acting coach, but when functioning as the YPS on a production, their exclusive focus is the emotionally challenging content. That concentrated, undivided third-party attention is precisely what makes the role effective.

YPS training

In early 2026, Safe Sets, led by Èmil Haarhoff, Tamryn Spiers, Kate Lush and Sara Blecher, took this methodology global. Our first international cohort brought together practitioners from the UK, Ireland, Kenya, South Africa, Spain, Czech Republic, and Germany. They completed online and in-person training in London and are currently under full mentorship with Safe Sets, ready to work.

Watch highlights from our London training and learn how purposeful play is integral to the YPS process.

Purposeful play is the basis of the YPS methodology, harnessing the young performer's primordial need and ability to play. Young people enter imaginary worlds, embody characters, and move between fiction and reality with a fluency that adults have largely lost. Through harnessing familial events and the young performer's innate ability to distinguish between reality and fiction in play, the performance realm can be sculpted as a consequence-free environment that functions within their subjective developmental phase and unique idiosyncrasies. The result is performances that are honest and truthful and young performers who leave set inspired rather than depleted.

There is a phrase that drove the case for the intimacy coordinator: "if no-one asks, who asks?" This directly transfers to the YPS as well. For too long nobody has taken formal ownership of the difficult conversations, assessments and consent advocacy surrounding young performers on set. Once these processes are shoved under the proverbial rug, traumatisation and abuse is a matter of luck (or the lack thereof). Left unaddressed, these processes become a legal tick-box exercise, one that doesn't come close to mitigating the real damage that can be caused. That is a cost no production, and certainly no child, should bear.

Finally, the YPS as coordinator, mitigator, advocate, performance architect and creative collaborator exists now, in several countries around the world, as an active and tested response. Not a theoretical safeguard, a practical one, deployable immediately.

To learn more about the role CLICK ON THIS LINK and should you be interested in training, please take a look at our training website AT THIS LINK.

The inaugural Young Performer Support Specialist (YPS) cohort includes:

UK: Kate Lush, Sam Murray, Haruka Kuroda, Simon Pollard and Grace Warwick

Ireland: Ciara Duffy

Spain: Mora Bereih

Kenya: Akinyi Oluoch

Germany: Isabel Lutz

Czech Republic: Deni Francova

South Africa: Tamryn Spiers, Èmil Haarhoff, Sara Blecher, Tara Notcutt

Written by Dr. Èmil Haarhoff and Sara Blecher