Maddie Ziegler is opening up about her experience on Dance Moms, and she's starting the conversation with her own mother.
The actor and dancer shared that her mother Melissa Ziegler-Gisoni actually apologized to her about her time on the popular Lifetime reality show, revealing that she started the conversation about its impact on her life on a recent appearance on Emily Ratajkowski's podcast High Low with EmRata.
"Last year, I was having a really bad panic attack and I called my mom and things were coming up from the past, and she apologized to me," Ziegler shared. "She was like, 'I'm so sorry I put you through that.' It's so sad because she would never want to hurt us, but none of us knew how crazy it would get." Ziegler was just seven years old when she joined the show and became one of its breakout stars, and the pressure from both producers, who wanted drama for storylines, and the team itself, started to weigh on her.
"Looking back — and a lot of people have started to say this — it's like, 'Wow, she actually had the most pressure on her,' because she was like, 'You're my girl, so you have to lead everyone to victory every time,' which is just not sustainable," Ziegler recounted, appearing to address former coach Abby Lee Miller. Ziegler eventually left the show in 2016 and continued working closely with Sia, but the hectic pace of Dance Moms meant she lost a lot of her childhood to TV.
Ziegler, who started dancing at age two, says she "blocked out" a lot of her early years. "I've blocked out so much of my childhood that I actually don't know what my life was like even just before working," she told Ratajkowski. "It's weird to find out things that I did when I was younger on TikTok. I'll see people posting things of me, and I'm like, 'I don't even remember doing that.' "
Ziegler has spoken about her relationship to the show that made her a household name before; she's clearly done a lot of reflecting on her Dance Moms experience and how it shaped her. In 2022, she told Cosmopolitan while Dance Moms helped catapult her to fame, she considered it a "toxic environment" and was ready to leave it behind. "My dance teacher taught that if you don’t get the trophy, if you don’t get the crown, you are less than, which is the worst way to train a kid. It carries into other life lessons," she shared. "We also weren’t allowed to watch our competitors or be friends with them. I’ve had to unlearn a lot of those things."
