Not winning a beauty pageant is telling children that are not good looking enough or they’re not special. They may begin to starve themselves just to have that ideal “perfect” image, this leads to life-long eating disorders. They are also put under a lot of stress trying to please everyone. Beauty pageants are killing the self esteem of the children involved. Many parents of these girls
Mini Barbie Dolls Child beauty pageants should be banned. The expanding trend of child beauty pageants is growing rapidly in the United States and should be stopped immediately. Mothers enroll their daughters into these beauty pageants and the little girls, sometimes as young as four years old, compete against one another almost entirely based off of their outer beauty. The pageants throw in the “talent” section for the girls to compete in where they show off a gymnastics routine or something physical that supposedly directs the judges eyes off of mainly beauty, but all in all that is exactly what they are judging these little girls on. These children are way too young to be worrying about what they look like when they look in the mirror.
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.
Through free verse, readers are taken into teenage Clare’s head. She has been training as a ballet dancer for ten years, living and breathing dance. Her goal to make it into one of the sixteen spots in the City Ballet Company, which has been a dream of her family’s since she was a little girl. However, the strain put on her body and mind threatens to burst as she tries to deal with everything surrounding her. Her best friend Rosella has taken to puking in the bathroom after class, with her mother’s encouragement; their classmate Dia has gained weight and everyone snickers that she will be kicked out any day; the girls silently compare their bodies to the others; and Clare can’t stop herself from growing into the tallest girl in class.
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
Child Beauty Pageants Should Be Banned When you were younger, you probably played dress up, for fun and games. Well, some irresponsible mothers in the United States are taking the concept of dressing up and turning it up several levels, and transforming their children into replicas Barbie dolls. The young pageant model is adorned with fake tans, hair extensions, 50 layers of make-up and fake teeth. After being put in extravagant, often inappropriate costumes, being fed health derogatory substances such as sugar packets and mixtures of high-energy drinks that even children twice their ages don’t even drink and performing tantrums of her reluctance to do her pageant, the juvenile Prima Donna is ready to go. Plastering on an over-exercised smile, the six year old walks on stage, cheered on by the joyful screams of her most-likely overweight mother.
In one school a 12 year old girl, a survivor of cancer who had under gone extensive chemo and radio therapy was being bullied due to the length of her hair and her height. Quite a few days of the week she would come home crying due to the rude remarks of the children around her, they called her baldy, spazz and midget. Obviously they don’t know what each of these words mean. The last thing this girl needed was to be called names because of the complications of the treatment. She now feels that she has to wear a wig.
This really bothered me for many reasons. One of the biggest issues that I had with this program and major element of the photo business is the effect it has on young girls, especially girls aged 9-15. This is a very critical age for girls because, during this time, puberty happens. During this time, more girls will stop doing what they love because they are self-conscious about their bodies enough without the help of the fashion industry. It isn’t fair for a girl to open a magazine and think that the images they see are how they should look.
When is it too Young to Exploit Young Girls? Everywhere we look there are advertisements, television shows and radio commercials that go against or for body image that goes towards children. For example, on the show on TLC “Toddlers and Tiaras”, I saw a mother put a padded bra on her six year old daughter, and another forcing her eleven year old daughter to wear a corset as she said, "It doesn't matter if you can breathe or not! It only matters if you look beautiful!” A lot of how the media looks affects how everyone looks at them or how they will do it to their children. Eating disorders are on the rise for the children and teens.
Beauty pageant participant, Kelsey Killeen said, “When I started going into pageants, it gave me so much self-confidence.” Pageant moms believe pageants are a good way to teach their daughters skills needed in life. Eight main skills mothers thought or hoped their children would learn from pageants were acquiring confidence, learning to be comfortable onstage and around strangers, gaining poise, determining the best way to present oneself, realizing the need for practice, learning good sportsmanship, becoming more outgoing and learning to listen (“Child Beauty”). Some parents have even said that they have placed their children in pageants because of a birth defect their child had (“Child Beauty”). These parents wanted to support the fact that their children are normal and beautiful no matter if they have birth defects (“Child Beauty”). In numerous pageants it is required that the contestant raise money for a local