Child Beauty Pageants

1238 Words5 Pages
Child Beauty Pageants Is allowing your child to participate in pageants protecting and caring for your child in the best way possible or is it perverting the natural beauty found in every child to some impossible painted standard best adhered to only by drag queens? The old saying goes; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, someone or something that is considered attractive to one person may not necessarily appeal to another. If we lived in a perfect world, maybe everyone would follow the wise words of this old saying and admit that evaluating beauty is a biased practice. Beauty pageants are a needless aspect in society simply because they put a big emphasis on money, set unrealistic beauty standards for easily influenced young girls, and they encourage judging on appearance, rather than on a person's character. Child beauty pageants are fun to watch. The cute little girls all dressed up in their tiny gowns, dancing, singing, and prancing around. The pageants consist of modeling sportswear, evening attire, dance and talent. 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. Each of these symptoms, or problems, is not associated with all contestants in beauty pageants. They are

More about Child Beauty Pageants

Open Document