What’s a soon-to-be-forgotten don to do when his star is fading and his gold teeth are losing their luster? If you’re Master P, the big bad slurring mouth of the South, you do what’s only right: shell out thousands of dollars for the right to loop the Jackson 5 classic “I Want You Back,” add a basic drum pattern to it, and let your 11-year-old son — the rapper Lil’ Romeo — rhyme over it, not only to kickstart the prepubescent kid’s rap career but to light a fire under your own declining empire.

Welcome to kiddie rap as business strategy, the latest maneuver in a line of rapping child-labor exploitation that’s almost as old as hip-hop itself. As in the more traditional sweatshops where kids toil through unceasing hours of banal repetitive motion, unhappiness seems to come with the territory. Just check out the video for the young Romeo’s first single, “My Baby,” from his forthcoming debut CD (Lil’ Romeo, due from No Limit on July 3). In it, he’s got everything a boy-to-man could want: cheerleading girls with shirts spelling his name, a huge party thrown in his honor, even a helicopter to whisk him away when the mob gets out of control. But there’s hardly a flicker of joy on the young boy’s face as he robotically raps and dances. Maybe he’s freaked out by the Michael Jackson impersonator prowling around the set, but what should be carefree fun is instead sapped of life. It’s hard work being Lil’ Romeo.

P’s been cultivating Romeo for years, having given his seed an early taste of the rap life as a member of the post-fetal rap duo Lil Soldiers. But Romeo’s solo turn isn’t wholly organic. His immediate, stunning, baffling ascent to the top of the Billboard Hot Rap Singles chart (three weeks running so far) would have been impossible without that other bandanna-wavin’, faux crip-walkin’, cornrow-rockin’ munchkin of a rhymeslinger, Lil Bow Wow. Although his now multi-platinum debut album — Beware of Dog (So So Def/Columbia) — is almost a year old (it’s been on the Billboard charts for 35 weeks), the Lil Bow Wow phenomenon continues to grow at a blistering pace. MTV salivates over him. BET follows him around as if he might negotiate a Middle East peace treaty on tour.

Like Romeo, Bow Wow’s got a bunch of teenyboppers in his videos chasing him and offering him all sorts of things that naughty babies shouldn’t do — his current single is “Bow Wow (That’s My Name).” But that mania appears to be spilling over into real life. Press accounts of being out in public with him read like something from the Beatles files. Girls attack his chauffeured car. At mall appearances, he occasionally has to be hoisted away on a bodyguard’s shoulder. As he told a journalist colleague of mine in a more subdued moment, “Sometimes I just want to be home, riding my bike.”

A hard-knock life for a kid who counts both Snoop Dogg and Jermaine Dupri as mentors. In the collective rush for commodification, no one stopped to consider that maybe Bow Wow just wanted to be a kid for a little while longer. It’s classic child-star pathology, seen in everyone from Frankie Lymon to Todd Bridges. What makes these latter-day hip-hop cases even more reprehensible is that these speed races past puberty are practically plotted in advance by experienced hustlers who know that, in an already bloated rap landscape, novelty is key.

That’s not to say that kids have never been used as strategic pawns before. Roxanne Shanté was but a teen when Marley Marl scooped her up for “Roxanne’s Revenge”; so was Foxy Brown when she first appeared on LL Cool J’s “I Shot Ya” remix. Jermaine Dupri even has a bit of a kidsploitation history, what with his discovery and promotion of Kris Kross. Hell, a decade ago, kid rappers were almost as popular as they are now — remember how the sartorically dyslexic Kross beefed with the Michael Bivins–supported nursery school called Another Bad Creation?

But of all the kid rappers, the one I admired most was LL Cool J. Sure, he’s bloated and corny now, but 17 years ago, he was the best thing going in hip-hop: a cocky 16-year-old from Queens who knew what he wanted so badly that he sent demos out — on his own, I should add — to all the rap luminaries of the day. Def Jam signed him, and though their empire may have been built on the back of the underage LL, the Def folks exploited him not because he was a kid but because he was the freshest MC on the block. And he wrote his own rhymes, too.