Attack of the Stage Parents!

David Archuleta's father is reputedly pushing obscure Australian pop songs on his American Idol contender son. Parental units are making scenes on I Know My Kid's a Star. Mama Rose is telling Louise to sing out nightly on Broadway.

Stage parents are back.

"I don't know if they're getting worse or if they're getting exposed now," says Julie Stevens, an on-set teacher for working child actors in Los Angeles. "Now they're in front of the camera."

Paul Petersen wouldn't disagree.

"These creatures used to hide under the rocks," says the child-actor advocate, borrowing a turn of phrase he says he got from Melissa Gilbert. "Now they're on top of the rocks, sunning themselves."

Certainly, they're in the spotlight on I Know My Kid's a Star, the new Danny Bonaduce-hosted VH1 reality series that pits child performer against child performer, and ups the drama by moving them into one house along with their, as the network puts it, "very intense stage parents."

Even more intensity is on the way.

Thursday brought the opening of the Broadway revival of Gypsy, the classic musical about the classic nightmare stage parent, Rose Hovick. The summer will bring the new E! series, Living Lohan, starring Lindsay Lohan's mother, Dina. (E! Online is a division of E! Entertainment Television.)

In the case of David Archuleta, the singer's father, Jeff Archuleta, has a much lower profile, being only occasionally and briefly glimpsed in the Idol studio audience. But in the headlines, Jeff Archuleta has become as much a figure as his frontrunner son, with reports of the elder Archuleta upbraiding his 17-year-old until the boy was in tears.

The "stage father from hell" angle spiked again this week when Cowell critiqued David Archuleta's performance of "You're the Voice" by telling the teen he'd be "shocked if you picked that song yourself." TMZ.com chimed in with a report that Cowell's remark was a swipe at Jeff Archuleta.

David Archuleta addressed the matter on Wednesday's results show, insisting that, yes, he loved the song, made famous in Australia by John Farnham, and, yes, he picked the song.

Chikezie, the latest Idol finalist to be expelled from the show, and thus the latest Idol insider to be freed up to talk to reporters, said tensions between Archuleta's father and the Idol production team were unknown to him.

"Everyone got together pretty well," he said Thursday.

Whatever is or isn't going on behind the scenes at Idol, Petersen says what's going on, in general, isn't pretty, fueled by the new reality-TV reality where everybody, even the parent of a performer, can become a star.

"The good people have gone silent," says Petersen, himself a former child star and teen idol, best known for his 1960s run on The Donna Reed Show, who now heads the child-actor lobbying group A Minor Consideration. "Stage parents used to be put in their place more emphatically."

British author Lisa Gee, whose upcoming memoir, Stage Mum, recounts how her daughter Dora was cast in a London production of The Sound of Music, leaving her in the unexpected role of stage mother, has a prescription for the problem.

"There should be a blanket ban on applying the 'star' word to anyone too young to cook their own dinner," Gee wrote in an email. "If we didn't make child 'stars'—and just had children who have a nice time singing, dancing and acting, and end[ing] up with a bit of money to pay their way through college, I suspect we'd end up losing the stage moms and dads."

Stevens, who as a child performer appeared in Broadway's Annie and went on to chronicle her and her castmates' experiences in the documentary Life After Tomorrow, has a more succinct solution—if not advice—for the stage mother or father: "Back off." 

If nothing else, Stevens says, stage parents are plain bad for business—their children's business.

"It scares people, in the same way Macaulay Culkin's father tanked his [Macaulay Culkin's] career," she says.

To Stevens, stage fathers are "scarier" than stage mothers.

"I think it's something about their vibe," she says. "They're more bullies. They're very much in your face. I think a stage mother is craftier."

Petersen's seen bad ones of every kind. And he doesn't think they're contained to show business anymore.

"Even that mousy mother sitting in the back in swim practice knitting a sweater is posting vicious things about her kid's competitors on the Internet," he says.

All of this just might mean the stage parent isn't back, after all, because as Gee writes: "I'm sure the stage parent never went away."