Child beauty pageants: a critical perspective

I think that it is wrong for girls under the age of 16, to enter beauty pageants.

Many people would probably think, that it’s pretty hard not to let everybody enter the contests, ‘cause what could happen? It’s just healthy competition, right? No one gets hurt..

Or do they?

I have seen some shows on TV about this particular subject, and they seem to prove, that it in fact does have a huge influence on many of the competing girls, especially if they are young.

In many cases it’s the mother’s who try’s to relive their dreams of becoming a beauty princess through the child. And because of the pressure of not letting their mother or caretaker down, the children keep pushing them selves to the extreme, until they have succeeded, and their mother is satisfied and happy. That doesn’t necessarily mean, that the child is happy about the win.

The road to success is often too rough on the child, and that can cause a lot of problems for the child.

The tragic thing about it all is really, that if the child is very young, it can’t do much to solve it all. In the end it’s the parent who makes the choices for the child. And those choices aren’t always the right once. If that is the case, I think, that there should be someone from the outside who is especially aware of any traumas with the child. If it’s at a beauty pageant, or any other competition like that, with young children involved, there could be a child psychologist hired to take care of them, for example.