Women didn’t used to admit to dying their hair, either, but I don’t care who knows I’ve been dying my greys since high school. I don’t think we’ll ever reach a stage where what goes on for child beauty pageants becomes the norm (at least, I sure hope not).
But you have an Indian background and the culture there is to have pierced ears very young. When I was a kid, very young girls having pierced ears was considered a bit too adult and something the conservative “nice” girls didn’t have done till a bit older.
When he was three, the Kidlet was worried about getting Parkinson’s. We explained that if it happens it will be when he is very, very, very, very old (“older than either Grandpa James or Grandpa Joe got to be”) and that since nobody in the family has ever had it, he probably won’t either - we did not get him an appointment with a neurologist!
(Actually, The Grandma From Hell has now developed a slight tremor - at 96yo. Gosh. She didn’t have it yet when that conversation took place)
I disagree that pierced ears = maturity. In many cultures pierced ears = non sexual femininity. The only problem with it is that if you had your ears pierced when you were born, by the time you are 50 they drag a bit.
Yeah, when I was a kid I had pierced ears younger than the other girls, and their parents were very disapproving. It was like wearing make up to them. Weird.
Looks like the girl has been taken out of the Mom’s custody.
I’m torn, but I don’t really have a problem with it, as long as the girl is now with Grandma or someone, instead of some horrid orphanage or something. The article doesn’t say.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/california-daughter-injected-botox-longer-custody-mom/story?id=13611279
That seems like a badly-written or badly-edited item. It begins,
but ends,
This is about halfway down:
If the Mum grew up in England, she can’t even claim to have grown up with extreme beauty pageants as a norm in her life. They do exist here, but they’re really uncommon, even more so thirty years ago.
I kinda heard the ‘good girls didn’t wear earrings’ thing as a kid too (in brackets, same as MarkXXX - he wasn’t advocating that view). This was because most of those who pierced their daughter’s ears young were from families not considered ‘good.’ Indian families could get away with it. And I did get my ears pierced fairly young… 
I still don’t see five-year-olds in make-up, though. Maybe some glittery lipgloss or something like that for a party, but otherwise no.
Okay, it now seems that:
- They are real people.
- Their names are not Kerry and Britney Campbell.
- They’re not in San Francisco.
- The investigation begun by SFHSA appears to have contributed to them being found nonetheless.
- The child has been removed from the home by child welfare officials in the appropriate jurisdiction.
Mom may lose temporary custody but not lose permanent custody. The parenting classes and such are what might be required for mom to regain custody.
I’m sure classes are all that she’ll need to stop living vicariously through her poor daughter.
I hope they do a complete and ongoing psyche evaluation.
And where’s dad? Did I miss that?
He was a research scientist who died a little while ago in his eighties. Yes, really. It’s in the Sun report.
Oh. Uhhhhh…okay…
It’s also a common way to distinguish between whether your baby is a boy or a girl, which is more important in some families. Kids tend to be gender neutral until they start walking and talking somewhat fluently, so it’s an easy way to distinguish beyond the “constantly have her wear pink” for parents of girls.
As for Mom and the botox injections, I think that it’s a behavior that’s extremely lacking in the kind of advanced “is this good for my child?” thinking that we hope most if not all parents are using when dealing with medical procedures. I’m a bit dumbfounded as to how she thought this was appropriate for her child, and am additionally was caught off guard by the “virgin waxing” procedures. I had no idea that people were doing that. Their children will be missing out on making a decision about a distinct marker of adulthood if it actually works, regardless of whether they keep the pubic hair or remove it at a later date.
I was hoping this was a hoax, but the child has been taken into care according to the BBC -
edit - I see this has already been brought up, but it’s a different source i’ve quoted so I’ll leave it up
The mother’s quote in that article:
“It’s a tough world in the pageant and the kids are harsh. Being confident is something she has to be with them.”
This simply boggles my mind because she states this as if it was a mandatory function for her daughter, like school. It is as if the alternative (not making your daughter pageant) is inconceivable and she is merely making the best of a bad situation.
Future strippers gotta come from somewhere, just good there are parents out there with the foresight to maintain the stock…
As far as child beauty pageants, they bother me for several reasons, from giving girls some serious image issues to turning them into sex objects just way too soon.
And something I’ve been curious about for a while with these beauty pageant girls: I remember growing up before these things were big (I don’t even know if they existed when I was a kid), there were those girls in our class that everyone thought was cute. They were the ones who got all the attention from boys and stuff like that. When puberty hit, it wasn’t so nice to a couple of them. It was like the anti-ugly duckling story. When they stopped getting the attention, it affected them hard. And this was just going from boys paying some attention to them to not getting the attention or at least not nearly as much.
The girls in the beauty pageant world aren’t going to be any different. As some of them hit puberty, their bodies are going to react in ways counter to them being beauty queen material. What happens to these girls? How broken do they become once the one thing that has been their entire sense of self is gone?
In the name of cosmic balance, I think we need little prince’s pageants. As long as BOTH the boys and the girls are getting hypersexed before age 10, it’s okay.
EQUALITY, YO!
You know that they actually have these, right?
I was being sarcastic.