Child Beauty Pageants Should be Banned Parents are the first form of mentors that children have to guide them into adulthood. As those mentors it is the parents’ job to positively shape their child’s moral character, values and ethics, and their overall mental, physical and spiritual development. Child beauty pageants go against that parental code by teaching that self-worth is in appearance, creating negative behavioral and emotional issues, as well as, sexually exploiting children and therefore, should be banned.
Self-worth
To begin with, pageants teach that self-worth is in the physical appearance, instead of within. Self-worth is about the value you place on yourself through an internal connection. Beauty pageants take away from that in the essence that it puts a high value on beauty and perfection instead of character. Children are taught at a young age, that they are in competition with others and whoever is the most beautiful and have perfected talents, are winners and everyone else is losers.
Along with that K. Meginnis-Payne & C. Travis (2001) , states “ In addition to promoting mixed messages about the role of beauty in women’s lives, beauty myths foster competition, divisiveness, and distrust among women. These myths undermine the collaborative, supportive relationships women create with one another. All beauty myths promote the idea that beauty is the most vital aspect of a women’s being.”
Negative Behavioral and Emotional Issues
Secondly, since a child can enroll in a pageant at the tender years of mind development and character building they are learning who to be and how to act, through the pageants rules, regulations, and environment. Pageantry becomes a lifestyle. Children are taught pageantry year long, it becomes them and they become pageantry. With these children constantly pushed to always be beautiful and taught to focus on their sexuality, they can and will become manipulative, self-obsessed individuals with eating disorders and possibly a dependence on drugs.
Because these pageants are so focused on appearance a study was published in the Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & prevention that pageant girls scored significantly higher on body dissatisfaction, interpersonal distrust, and impulse dysregulation, which is an inability to resist performing actions that would be harmful to themselves or others (Hollandsworth, 2011). Those indicators are what lead into negative and emotional behaviors of acting out, eating disorders whither its bulimia or anorexia, excessive exercise, drug use, sexual behavior and the list goes on. On the outside these young girls portray a confident happy self-esteem but on the inside they can be a turmoil of emotions and negative thoughts about them self as the study has stated.
Sexual Exploitation
Thirdly, though these pageants aren’t sexual in nature, the parts of their environment such as, revealing cloths, the wearing of make-up, flirtatious postures and facial expressions create a sexual atmosphere. Pageants that have young children dress up and look like grown woman take part in sexualizing them, which in turn opens the door to pedophiles and predators. According to Skip Hollandsworth (2011) a former detective by the name of Stacy Dittrich, stated, "I found, in the course of my work, pedophiles who had gone to great lengths to obtain videos of little girls walking around provocatively, pulling their shirts down off their shoulders and smiling at the camera."
By opening this door to such people, many of these young children are sexually violated and become scarred.
It’s not only they pedophiles that are a cause for concern, they are a small portion to the problem though a problem none the less. The main concern is the children themselves and what is being done to their spirit as they grow in the pageant world. Christine Tamer (2011) put it best in her article Toddler, Tiara and Pedophilia? The “Borderline Child Pornography” when she stated “When parents press their young children to participate in pageants that produce sexually suggestive images, the children, sometimes as young as two or three years old, are not making a knowing choice because children are too young to make decisions regarding their sexuality and sexual conduct. Very young children, who cannot understand their decisions to participate in child glitz beauty pageants, are being exploited by their parents in performing acts that such children will likely find loathsome upon reaching an age of maturity. Parents, who are supposed to be acting in the best interest of their children, are blinded by promises of fame and money. These children need to be protected by laws.”
Freedom
Many parents think putting their children in pageants creates self-confidence and a strong individual. What these parents are really doing is putting their children in a world that negatively impacts them in the most severe ways. The banning of child beauty pageants would eliminate negative behavioral and emotional issues that are created by the teaching of self-worth being in the appearance and sexual exploitation.

Reference

Hollandsworth, S. (2011, August). Toddlers in tiaras. Good Housekeeping, 252(8), 150-194, 11.

Meginis-Payne K. and Travis, C. (2001). Beauty politics and patriarchy: The impact on women’s lives. In Encyclopedia of women and gender: Sex similarities and differences and the impact of society on gender.

Tamer, C. (2011). Toddlers, tiara, and pedophilia? The “borderline child pornography” embraced by the American Public. Texas Review of Enteratinment & Sports Law., 13(1), 85-101. Retrieved from http://www.utexas.edu/law/journals/tresl/index.html