All around the world parent’s are putting their children into beauty pageants. Some of these children can barely talk and just learned to walk. Entering a child into beauty pageant is morally unjust and objectionable. What these children are learning isn’t helping them as much as they are harming them. They’re learning that physical beauty is the primary judges of their character and not their brains.
For most parents and their little girls it is just good fun. They do not take the beauty pageants seriously. For a few parents the beauty pageants become an obsession. This is when beauty pageants for children can suddenly become very harmful. “Critics of the industry warn that the stresses of competition, coupled with an extreme focus on physical appearance, can have a negative effect long before these girls will be eligible for Miss America.” (Triggs, West and Aradillas 160-168) The loss of self-esteem, the inability to show a full range of emotions, the fear of failure, the extreme focus on physical image, and the discord with or fear of parents are a few of the symptoms those little girls will suffer from.
These children are way too young to be worrying about what they look like when they look in the mirror. It is appalling for these grown adults, especially their moms, to be adding all the pressure and stress that should not be obtained until high school when their peers will start to judge naturally, it is disgusting and cruel. These young girls are dressed up provocatively and imitate grown woman by winking and blowing kisses to the judges while moving their bodies as if they were fully developed. The pageant world completely destroys their innocence. Girls have been seen dressed up as Dolly Parton wearing padding on their chest and bottom to pull of the full celebrity look.
But according to (Lalan Maliakal), she states that “the mothers pressurize their children to work their appearance to look like a Barbie doll.” Young Children forgo their improvement and childhood years for beauty pageants and pressure by their mothers to be the best, which for the most part is not good because the child’s virtuousness have been blemished and compress by false synthetic similes and counterfeit eyelashes and sophisticated appearance . Therefore the parents are stripping their children of being normal and not knowing how to interrelate with children their own age. As the children continue to develop their psychological mind set have altered where they feel that if they are not
In Time Magazine article, “Girls, Interrupted: Children Pay a Price When Childhood Ends Too Soon” written by Caitlin Flanagan, she addresses the concern for girls reaching puberty at an earlier age. In summary, Flanagan believes, “it’s cruel to expect adolescents to make the change from girl to woman without any special protections against the corrosive forces of the world, without sufficient time and privacy to work out the big questions of their lives” (Flanagan, 2011, p. 60). In a healthy father and daughter relationship, a young girl looks to her father as her protector, hero and Prince Charming. A little girl from the age 4-12 doesn’t think on sexual terms but more on fairytale fantasies when comparing the man she hopes to marry someday is similar to her own father. According to Freud, in the psychoanalytic theory, a girl’s sexual attraction to and intense love for her father is called the Electra complex (Hyde, 2007, p. 33).
When the children grow older they start to have self esteem issues which can lead to depression and other mental health problems. Another reason child beauty pagents should be banned is because of the innaproapriate outfits that parents make the children wear. An example of this is when a mother made her 3 year old daughter wear the Pretty Woman outfit. Most of the outfits worn by the small children have cuts in the side or back exposing a lot of skin, teaching children that dressing like this is acceptable. Child beauty pageants can also be financially straining.
Sara would use her fantasy stories to fill the void whenever she missed her father or felt hopeless. An adult watching (ALP) the story remains unique and believable. The actions of the characters and the importance of their role in the film seem more intense. The breakout scene of the picture was when Sara told Miss Minchin her beliefs despite the consequences. The vocal opinions of the child shocked the headmistress which engages the audience to the edge of the seat.
Squeaky explains that she runs everywhere, and does breathing exercises to stay in shape. Unlike her classmate Cynthia Procter, who pretends that she does not study, Squeaky does not mind if people know how hard she works to be successful. Throughout the story, Squeaky challenges conceptions of femininity by refusing to wear dresses or dance around the maypole, as well as by running and doing breathing exercises in front of other people. This behavior is unpleasant to her peers and to her parents, but Squeaky is committed in expressing her femininity in her own way. This kind of relationship also develops at the end, when Squeaky resolves her differences with Gretchen.
The children that compete in these beauty contests aged generally between 2 to 10 years old (sometimes even younger) usually have one only goal: get the money and get the tiara. Of course, these little beauties do not enter the contests at their own request, but their mothers are the ones to fill in the applications on time, pay the participation fee, create or buy the outfit, establish the type of performance for the talent section (usually some song about the greatest love in one’s life and/or a terrible heartbreak,) create and exercise the hairstyle and make-up, keep a strict rehearsal schedule, hire trainers if the mum herself cannot coach the whole thing, fill in the gas tank and travel hundreds of miles with their children just to spend a weekend on an emotional roller coaster that for most of the mother-daughter teams ends in heartbreak and
While some may say that beauty pageants are a form of sports, upon examining all of the evidence it is clear that these young girls are being sexually exploited because of the body language and dance moves, hair and make-up, provocative clothing and the pedophiles who attend these shows. Some parents believe that beauty pageants help their children develop self-esteem and boost confidence and this may be true for some children but for hundreds of others this is not the case. Research studies have proven that other children actually develop issues with their bodies, lost self-esteem, and are at higher risk for eating disorders, due to their warped values about themselves (Reed, Billy). This in fact I believe is the complete truth and reason being is that women are sexually exploited everywhere in the media. No matter what age a female is it seems they are all skinny, tall, absolutely beautiful, and have no flaws.