I know this has come up before, but I just came across this show again while channel skipping. What the fuck is up with these parents?
“Yes, because I was a wannabe beauty queen in high school I decided to dress my three year old like a little slut so I can get some vicarious thrills from parading my child across a stage”. Pedo theater…
These moms are fucking psychos.
Feel free to defend it.
Seems harmless enough, really.
I won’t watch that show, ever. IMHO it is putting the wrong emphasis on what a child should be.
But then I raised sons, not daughters. Evidently lots of people get a lot of pleasure out of watching that sort of stuff on TV.
I get the RO about these parents, I really do. It’s just astonishing how twisted some people are.
My REAL outrage, however, is reserved for the producers and broadcasters for putting this show – and many, many other reality shows – on TV in the first place. They exist simply to stir up RO. That’s it. Well, and to spawn other freakshows that vie for their 15 minutes of tee-vee fame.
I don’t agree (not vehemently, but fairly firmly). Little girls playing dress-up at home is harmless; little girls being pressured to be perfect and getting fake teeth and fake tans and spending every waking minute at pageants being judged or working on how to do better next time doesn’t seem harmless to me; it seems like a lot of pressure and stress for a result that really doesn’t seem worth the effort and stress and money.
If putting their children in beauty pageants was these women’s worst parenting decision, they wouldn’t be doing too badly. Sadly, it’s only the tip of the Bad Parenting Iceberg.
In psychological terms, they are fucking up a lot of kids.
That is my point. These little girls are being forced into this because their moms are forcing them into it. The mothers are using their children to make up for some psychological loss they feel.
Just like dads forcing their boys into baseball or football.
But the boys aren’t being forced to wear makeup and walk across a stage at three years old.
And yes it is force. Subtle and manipulative, but force.
This is really a faux ‘reality show’, the mothers pretend, audience is outraged yet entertained…like Orange Country Choppers or Jerry Springer. Whats fucked up is children are learning their mothers behavior is ok and no matter what they’re told off camera they’re really learning how not be become adults.
My wife watches Dance Moms and it’s the same thing there, attention whoring mothers proving they aren’t worthy of the job.
It’s not a faux ‘reality show’, google child beauty peageants.
This happens all over the US.
There’s a few things I’ve seen whilst surfing, catching T&T and watching for a while.
There’s the aforementioned fake teeth, spray tans, hair extensions. What bothers me is the actions, both of the mothers and that the mothers force on the children.
There was a flap over here in the last week about one of the “Star” beauty pageant girls from the US coming over to headline a local pageant that’s trying to get off the ground. This little girl is under 8 years old, but her dance routine included things like hip thrusts, spanking her ass and winking over her shoulder, booty popping and that thing where I don’t know what it’s called, but you hold your fists up at shoulder height and kind of “pop” out your torso so it thrusts (what would be) your breasts forward. I don’t like that on little girls.
Then there’s the episode I’ve seen where a little four year old girl had been up since 5am so her mommy could drag her two states over to the pageant ballroom. She was sitting having her hair teased and false eyelashes put on, and she got poked in the eye accidentally because she was yawning and squirming a bit - this being 12 hours or so after she’d been woken up for the day. This devolved into a full-on tantrum. Mom’s response? “Shut up, quit your crying. You’ll ruin your makeup.”
The little girl “placed” but didn’t win grand over all champion. And mom made sure that the little girl knew it was all her fault “If you hadn’t cried and ruined your makeup you would have won that”
There’s a level where little girls playing dress-up, walking around on a stage and winning a trophy for it isn’t wrong. It’s just that the beauty pageant “industry” seems to push it beyond that level into something that just feels inherently wrong in all aspects.
No, they exist to make money. Their purpose is, in fact, the same as any other show on a for-profit television network. In this respect, they are no different from dramas like Lost or talk shows like Oprah! or comedies like Two and a Half Men.
Sure, part of their business plan might be to stir up RO, but you can be sure that if people weren’t watching and advertisers were not paying for space, the show would be yanked in a heartbeat.
Television executives are, for the most part, fairly agnostic about content and quality. They are not really selling entertainment to audiences; they are selling audiences to advertisers. If they could get you to sit in front of advertising without giving you any TV shows at all, they’d do it in a second. It just happens that shows like Toddlers and Tiaras attract enough viewers to also attract advertisers, and that’s what the network wants.
What’s even more sad is that all these children are attractive without the fake tans, hair and pounds of makeup. One episode had a mother getting her daughter’s eyelashes DYED. That is fucked up shit.
One little pageant girl was being given sugar cubes for every time she did her routines well. Hope that girl doesn’t ennd up diabetic after meals of sugarcubes.
I sure as hell hope the kid’s name isn’t Flicka.
Eating sugar doesn’t cause diabetes. Having said that…
My major complaint is that these little girls aren’t allowed to be kids. There might be a FEW of them that enjoy the fuss and the glamor and the competition. But I bet that most of them would far rather be playing with friends and getting into trouble, like normal kids.
I’ve always disliked these pageant things (didn’t even know they existed until the JonBenet murder but loathed them instantly) but that dance routine turned my stomach. The posing and posturing is overtly sexy and I can’t imagine why the mothers would ever allow, let alone encourage, their daughters to become involved in that stuff.
What gets me is why can’t they at least just the little girls LOOK like little girls? Do little Shirley Temple routines, with tap shoes and sailor dresses, or something like that? Why must they look like adults?
Lynn made a good point and I am sue that this girl eating sugar cubes whose name escapes me will be ok.
What i SHOULD have said was that the girl with the DYED eyelashes could be more fucked up with such chemicals near her eyes; and that to me was way more fucked than sugarcubes.
Sometimes I just sit and watch for a few minutes while i’m folding laundry but these people are craaazzzzyyyyy. Thank the goddess of galaxies that my parents had no money for pageants.
Maybe in your opinion. It pushes my creep-o-meter gauge to the red end of the scale, though.
Some of these parents are tens of thousands of debt on credit cards to pay for this stuff. Second and third morgages, and they can never win as much in the show as the outfit they’re wearing cost.