One of my co-workers enters her daughter (age 2) in pageants. I am sure this is what her daughter will be looking like in a couple of years. Man. Right now the little girl looks pretty normal. She models a little bit in print too but it doesn’t pay all that great.
The co-worker used to work for a local pageant too as a volunteer and thinks it’s a great thing for girls to do, since the prize at that one was a 4 year college scholarship. Maybe, for 18 year olds, but not for 6 year olds IMHO.
Yea ok those moms are ridiculous.
Yeah, I feel like it’s one thing for an older person to think about the options and what it means, etc. I mean, I feel like I’m an adult and I have enough issues with the whole standards of beauty thing, but throwing your little kid in when she’s six just seems downright cruel.
The mothers remind me of some cat-show people I used to know. With kids that young it’s not much different from people who do show dogs/cats/whatever. It’s a strange and insular world. The industry professionals strike me as creepier than the parents.
The kids say they like it and want to do it, but most of them seem to have started as infants, so they’re probably conditioned simply to think so. If it weren’t so creepy it might be a little like child athletes. I was in the pool and on a stopwatch before I was old enough to to make an informed decision about donating my shoulder joints in pursuit of a college scholarship. I know at the grade-school age I was forced to go to practice sometimes. Is my deep and abiding love of swimming (to this day, despite the busted shoulder) merely conditioned from childhood?
(In the end I suppose it doesn’t matter. Training a love of a physical activity into your child is a good thing. Training her to wear too much mascara and shake her bottom as the path to success, not so much)
A very dear friend of mine was a child beauty pageant contestant in the 1980s. She’s said that she herself was disturbed by the Jon Benet photos, as when she was doing pageants the kids weren’t made up to like like “tiny hookers”. (Not that that looked natural, just less sexualized.) Even so, my friend says herself that she has issues relating to her pageant days: “My earliest memories are people judging me based on how I looked.”
Her mom was also psycho. She was a former beauty queen herself and was determined that her little girl was going to go the same route.
I dunno, I think that admiting it looks weird isn’t the same as saying I think it looks ugly or needs correcting. Just occasionally I can admit my kid’s every feature itsn’t the most gorgeously perfect thing ever. ::shrug:: She is my lovely, healthy daughter, who’s teeth kinda look weird at the moment.
But putting caps on a 6-yer-old’s teeth? Now that is weird.
From the OP’s link to the video:
In my humble opinion, this is a disgusting way to raise a child.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that you did think it needed correcting. I guess my point was something more like–thinking it looks weird is one thing. Thinking that it needs to be covered up is quite another. We’re in total agreement on this point, I think.
What I think is regrettable (in addition to all the reasons listed above) is that these families and kids are investing so much time and money into an activity that is not giving the kid any worthwhile skills. Kids who are forced into karate, or swimming, or ballet, or piano lessons are at least coming out of it with some athletic or musical skills. These pageant kids aren’t even learning modeling, for heaven’s sake. The real modeling industry disdains pageants and pageant-style posing.
They look straight out of a pre-school recreation of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Patsy Ramsey claimed that beauty pageants nloy took “a couple of hours a week.” Maybe the actual pagent, but not the prep work.
During the JonBenet bruhah, one of the pageant judges was trying to justify a tape of her appearance in the talent concert singing and shaking: Oh, she’s showing pose. Working with the prop. Showing her dance skills.
Yeah, right, while the child is looking and acting like a hooker enticing a cleint.