Launching and Maintaining a Hoboken Baby Modeling Career

There are three factors that contribute to a : Luck, hard work and choice.

Getting signed by a modeling agency is largely based on luck. You have to live near New York City or Los Angeles, and your child has to have the right look and temperament. If you want to try to get signed by an agency, you should send a couple of your child's photos to the main agencies.

The photos should be bareheaded (no hats), with the child smiling and looking directly at the camera. It's a good idea to include one headshot and one full body photo. It might take them a while to get back to you, but if your child has the right look they will respond. You should include their date of birth, gender and clothing sizes.

Reputable agencies do not charge anything for photos or classes, so watch out for the people in malls who dart up to you and ask if you would like to have your child model. You will need to take frequent digital camera photos to keep up with your baby's changing appearance; every three months for an infant and every six months for toddlers.

Once you get signed by an agency, that is when the hard work begins. You will be sent on go-sees so the agency can see if casting agents like your child's look and temperament. This is the phase when most families wash out of child modeling; the odds of being chosen from an open go-see are less than 1 percent. My younger child was an ideal baby model; always sweet-tempered and smiling, he was chosen for shoots almost every time.

Go-see calls typically go out the evening beforehand. You have to respond immediately to let the agency know if you will be going since they have a limited number of spots available. The easiest jobs to get are print ads; the hardest (but also the best paid) are commercials.

Once your child is established as a marketable model, you will start getting requested go-sees and direct bookings based on your online modeling profile. That is the point where choice comes into play. You can decide to go for the big time, and tell the agency to send you out to as many go-sees as possible, plus get professional photos taken of the child and enroll her in modeling and acting classes.

Or, you can go for the low-maintenance route, where you and the agency work together to only send you to requested go-sees that have a high probability of success.

Everyone has different experiences with child modeling. A good friend of mine—we'll call her D.—was a child model  until she was 13.

"Some of my fondest childhood memories are from modeling, such as tea parties with friends and relatives," D. said. "From my perspective, all I was doing was spending the occasional afternoon dressing up, playing and taking my picture with friends." 

To read more about what makes Kathy Zucker tick, check out her blog at http://hobokenmomcondo.com/momblog and follow her at http://twitter.com/kathyzucker