Beauty Pageants Essay

618 Words3 Pages
Should children be involved in beauty pageants? All around the world parents are putting their children into beauty pageants. Some of these children can barely talk and just learned to walk. Entering a child into a beauty pageant is just insane. 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. Child beauty pageants are wrong because it encourages sexuality at a young age; they damage a child’s self esteem and even cause them to become anorexic or bulimic in order to become ‘beautiful’. For years, we have seen adult sexuality being inappropriately and aggressively put on innocent young children, but kids today are being sexualized at younger and younger ages. Years ago, parents worried about their teen daughters wearing clothes that were too exposed for their age. Now parents are telling their third-graders they need to have a padded push-up bikini top, or that they need to have shoes that promote fitness, but are the same shoes sold to adults to tone and shape buttocks and thighs. Dr Brock has stated, 'Sexualisation is a process whereby a child's value is based on their appearance or behaviour to the exclusion of other characteristics, and attractiveness as a child is equated with being sexy. This is claimed to be undesirable because it imposes a premature sexuality on children and takes the interests and activities that are better suited to their stage of development. Beauty pageants can also lower self esteem within a child, by making them believe they are not good enough when they lose. They start to look at their looks, and abilities as less than they did previously. Also, it may lead the child to become depressed and cause them to become anorexic or bulimic in order to win. Arizona, has stated, 'Many experts agree that
Open Document