…and what makes it even creepier, at least to me, is I suspect families involved in child pageants are the just the type (a little too evangelical and a little too conservative) who believe Purity balls are a good thing.
I think it’s a movement to create a world full of future Promise Keepers myself. Oh yeah. Full-circle creepy.
I think this is key. Dress-up is about *expanding *your horizons - be a little girl (or boy) or be a pirate or a princess or a dragon or a robot or a…
Parents who go overboard may think they’re expanding their child’s horizons, but usually they’re limiting them, often severely, in order to fit a narrow mold of “winner”. And I do think this can be true of pageanting or Little League or theater or band or soccer or any other structured activity.
And this is great! You sound like you had a fabulous time, and your parents knew how to handle it without going crazy. But am I misremembering your username, or didn’t you struggle with an eating disorder? Couldn’t that have been a seed early planted?
But I do have to add that, as a parent, it’s sometimes really hard to tell when your kid is really having fun, or when they’re pretending to have fun because they can tell that something is really important to you. It’s the later group of kids I worry about, no matter what the activity.
But some little girls like expanding their horizons by dressing up like pageant princesses.
My daughter would never sit still long enough to have her hair combed into anything appropriate for grandmas, much less a pageant. Nor was she very eager to sing and dance for an audience. Getting her ready for the few dance recitals and stuff of that nature she was in was never easy for either of us.
But I’ve been to enough dance recitals, gymnastics meets, piano recitals with my uninterested and untalented (but still wonderful) children to know that some little girls eat it up. And when mother and daughter both love to dress up like this, it isn’t always a horrible thing. There are things to be learned through pageant work that translate into life skills.
And sometimes it isn’t the parent that is pushing. Kids will often beg their parents for a bigger commitment to whatever activity is their obsession. When the kid is driving it, and the parents are agreeable to the commitment, you get a situation where little gymnasts are in the gym three hours a night four nights a week. Not a commitment I’d make for my kids, but then, they might judge me for not letting my kids find their potential (I have the theory of well rounded kids - piano, dance, gymnastics, tae kwon do, soccer, baseball, guitar, weaving, clay, Spanish - all have been tried by either or both my nine and ten year old in a formal setting)
I am not a parent, but isn’t a basic part of parenting not allowing children to overdo things? Pointing out that everything has a limit and that even good things go bad if pushed too hard. When do the little gymnasts find time for school, homework, social groups outside the gym and just plan relaxing? Who is charge here anyways?
From what I’ve gathered, learning to say “no” is one of the most important, and the hardest, parts of being a good parent.
And that’s cool; that’s when it’s okay in my book. I was my niece’s biggest cheerleader for her first pageant. And her second and third. As long as it was clearly self-motivated and fun, I didn’t have a problem with it. Still don’t.
When they started talking about pulling her out of school so she could enroll in out of state pageants was when I started to worry. And when she started crying and begging me to tell her mom she shouldn’t do it anymore, I thought it was time to stop. But she never worked up the nerve to tell her mother, and in fact when I did, she lied when confronted about it and told her mom she wanted to keep at it and she didn’t know what I was talking about. That’s what I meant when I said it can be very hard to figure out if your kid is *really *self-motivated, or just pathologically fearful of disappointing you.
When the parent believes it to be harmful - certainly. But different parents believe different things to be harmful or helpful and encourage and discourage different things. Pageant moms certainly don’t believe pageant work is harmful, or they wouldn’t encourage it. They believe they are giving their kids opportunities - letting them grow.
I have a coworker whose son is a nationally ranked teenage concert violinist. Yeah, there has been some parental encouragement, but when he said at 17 “I’m done” - Mom and Dad said “fine.” Kid got into every college he applied to (he has excellent grades as well) - names like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. He has traveled nationally and internationally. The violin has given him opportunities normal kids don’t get. Now, I wouldn’t make the commitment for my kids necessary for them to become world class musicians, to me, that’s overboard. But the results with this kid to date have been pretty incredible.
Joe Mauer is sort of a shirttail relation of mine - as well as a Little League buddy of my cousin’s. Maybe his parents should have said no - but instead they let a kid with talent and drive develop his talent and drive. Its possible that his knee will blow out (he’s already had issues with it) or his arm and he’ll end up in a lot of pain - on the other hand - I’m not sure that even if he was guarenteed pain from long term and early stress on his body, he’d make different choices. Once again, not choices I’d make for my kids - then again, my kid has never displayed the talent Joe Mauer did at eight.
Actually, if I were going to name a childhood activity that contributed to any food issues I have, it would by gymnastics, not dancing around like a princess.
I think gymnastics is bad for little girls, it’s bad for their bodies, it does horrible things to their development and I would never let a child of mine participate. However, if they wanted to dress up like a princess, and wear glitter in their hair and dance around like a farie I would have no problem with it, whatsoever.
Like I’ve said about 50 times, pageants can be prefectly harmless fun. Just because some people are loony about it doesn’t mean everyone is.
Hm, my bad.
Though I still am not sure my argument for not doing pageants would be potential sexual abuse. I mean, that can happen to pretty much anyone and is a lot more likely to happen at the hands of people you know rather than strangers–though that is pretty creepy. From reading about JonBenet, all the stuff that her mom had her do, like the hair dyeing, and the make up, and the very adult clothes–it just feels wrong. Like what kind of complex is she going to get, growing up like that?
Yeah, I think the question is less about protection from actual abuse and more about the less tangible issue of exploitation.
I was kind of curious about this–obviously not all pageants are the same…but did you or other kids in pageants get dressed up the way JonBenet did? Though I do remember reading that even other parents of pageant kids were kind of creeped out by the outfits Patsy Ramsey chose for her daughter. Pretty much the only exposure I’ve had to pageants are the ones where it’s all over the top make up and airbrushing and all that…is there stuff that’s more…I don’t know, kid-friendly, for lack of a better word?