<p>
</p>
<p>To me, elaborate dressup is for private entertainment at home , with the child’s little friends or maybe mom joins in the fun by dressing up too. It’s initiated and controlled by the child, and starts and stops when she wants it to. There are no crowns, crowds, cash prizes, beauty shots, entry fees, thousand-dollar dresses, or pushy moms. Dressup also does not entitle the child to run the home, as so many of these pageant princesses seem to do.</p>
<p>Moms seem to be having a blast, living vicariously through their kids the life they had yearned for as children. The kids seem so indulged and demanding, given that what you teach your toddler is what you deal with in your teen, can you even imagine the teenage battles in these homes.</p>
<p>I agree that very few of the girls (and boys occasionally!) seem to enjoy the whole pageant thing. However, they love their moms and see that it makes their moms happy and they want want mom to be happy. It also seems that a substantial number of the moms are significantly overweight. One of them even said that she used to be skinny when she was younger and that she knows that people get treated better when they’re skinny and pretty. Many of them do seem to living vicariously through their kids.</p>
<p>Most of these families do not seem like they have enough disposable income to be spending thousands of dollars per pageant. However, many do it because they think their child will be “discovered” or make it to Hollywood or even become (Wow!!!) Miss America. Most of them don’t seem to want to do the math to figure out that if they spend $20000 a year on pageants and win 500 a year and a few trophies and tiaras, that they’re still far behind. Why does anyone need to spend that kind of money to have someone tell them that their kid is beautiful?</p>
<p>Instead of spending thousands of dollars on pageants, most of these families would be better off spending $200 in dress up clothes for their kids and having fun that way.</p>
<p>Overall, the show is creepy, but it is like a train wreck- hard to pull your eyes away once you’ve started watching.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So I guess you don’t mind the Madonna-inspired cone bra this little girl was wearing in a pageant:</p>
<p>[Toddlers</a> and Tiaras: 2-Year-Old in Madonna Cone Bra - Parenting.com](<a href=“http://www.parenting.com/blogs/show-and-tell/lauren-parentingcom/pageant-mom-dresses-2-year-old-madonna-inspired-cone-bra]Toddlers”>http://www.parenting.com/blogs/show-and-tell/lauren-parentingcom/pageant-mom-dresses-2-year-old-madonna-inspired-cone-bra)</p>
<p>Oh my God, teriwtt - that is revolting.</p>
<p>If you want to read some hysterical takes on this show, check out Television without Pity. Some of the folks there have never heard of pity and they have some damning observations about the pageant moms. From what I’ve seen, the moms featured on the show have a range of personality disorders and no sense of how to live within their means.</p>
<p>Lately I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that reality TV is just a big joke perpetrated on the American public because, really, * who acts like that*? And how sad for the little girls if what’s shown is at all accurate.</p>
<p>Even if the kiddie beauty pageants were a good thing (I think they are awful), the money spent is outrageous. It does make me look back at our family ski days as money well spent in comparison. </p>
<p>The show that caught our eye last week was “Cut Off”. It had grown millionaire girls who had pushed things too far wasting familiy money without a job etc. Wow, it showed me there are a few rich kids out there with LOTS worse entitlement than I could imagine.</p>
<p>It just occurred to me that, despite the fact that Miss America touts itself as the largest scholarship program in the country, I don’t recall many cc’rs asking if pageant participation is a good hook!</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>There was one applicant posting on the Harvard board a few years ago who was wondering whether to mention her beauty queen title (not Miss America) on her app. I don’t think she got in. But there were two beauty queen title holders in D1’s class at Harvard - both from Asian countries. Maybe Miss South Korea and Miss Singapore - I can’t remember for sure. One of them wrote a book back in her home country about how to get into Harvard.</p>
<p>But back to the kiddie beauty pageants. I saw a few minutes of that show myself as I was flipping around the channels in my hotel room. I found it both horrifying and fascinating at the same time. I wondered whether this is a Southern cultural thing, since everyone in the show was talking Dixie. But Jon Benet was in Colorado, wasn’t she?</p>
<p>Several years ago we were staying in a rather nice hotel in the Boston area. There was some sort of major kiddie beauty pageant going on in the hotel that weekend. The place was overrun with just the sort of parents/children seen on Toddlers & Tiaras. Our room was across the hall from the unofficial hair salon. I remember seeing a sign up sheet on the door with hair appointments scheduled as early as 6:00 a.m. Very sad.</p>
<p>I see kids playing soccer in the cold rain at 7 am. Also hockey at midnight. Many little girls like to play dress-up and there is nothing sexual about trying on adult roles at 4. It’s just play to them. What other sometimes warped adults project on it is their own problem.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Unless the part of being an adult the 4-year old is imitating is dressing up in sexy clothes and adopting overtly flirting, sexy behavior. Not all adult behaviors are equally appropriate for little children. There is some adult behavior that is okay for little kids to be pushed to imitate some that is best left to when they are older - in this case much older.</p>
<p>This is nothing about playing dress up. This is about moms who are forcing their sometimes two-year old kids (who cannot make the choice to participate in these pageants) to dress up like Madonna and parade around in front of hundreds of people (millions if you include those who watch these shows). And I’m sorry, waxing a little girls eyebrows while she’s screaming, “No, no, no,” is abusive. These moms are wanting baby girls just so they can have someone to do pageants… not because they want someone to play dress up with.</p>
<p>Funny that this thread appeared right after I spent an evening watching this season “On Demand”. I just don’t even know WHAT to say. The only two little girls that seemed to be having ANY fun to me were the little redhead who was not so much a glamour girl, but a girl who LOVED to perform and the little girl whose dad was in the airforce who you could tell just adored her. She seemed to have a boatload of confidence. Everyone else constantly seemed to be in some phase of meltdown, financial ruin or self-adulation.</p>
<p>To explain…I wouldn’t NORMALLY watch stuff like this, but I spent the week on the road recruiting at colleges. EXhausted!</p>
<p>When my youngest was 8, we also happened to stay at a hotel that was hosting a beauty pagent. We were riding in the elevator with a little girl (maybe age 6?) and her mom. She had fake hair, fake lashes, and a fake tan. She also had more makeup than I’ve ever worn in my life. The look on my son’s face was priceless. He looked up at me and said “She looks like a barbie doll”, and she did. </p>
<p>I have seen the show a couple of times and I remember being a little in shock about how much money some of these families were spending for the clothes/hair/makeup, talent training and pageants. The families I saw were not from wealth. I think many are banking on the dream, the same way some parents of a young althlete might, that this could be their child’s ticket out of where they are now and upward to a better life. The behavior on this show is extreme and I personally would be uncomfortable raising a daughter to believe she needs all the extra clothes and make-up to be beautiful, but the concept of competition, and the hope for the extreme success it can bring, is very much a part of our culture.</p>
<p>
These are not little girls who, all on their own, decided to experiment with Mommy’s lipstick and high heels. These are kids whose delusional parents are supporting an entire industry that pitches overpriced costumes, “flippers” (which apparently are used to cover up missing baby teeth), spray-on tans, walking coaches, registration fees in the thousands of dollars - it’s just beyond reason. The “warped” part is the way adults are using children - either as doll-like extensions of themselves, or simply for the cold hard cash involved.</p>
<p>I am fascinated by the media on it but I cannot watch it. TV in general usually makes me miserable. It is just incredible what they do to those children. Pageants, if they were truly talent shows and oratory contests and age-appropriate, I could see. But makeup and hooker costumes and the like? Insane!</p>
<p>On last week’s show one of the moms did her little girl’s (about 3 yo) complete routine from the audience along with her in order to keep her from getting distracted and so she would know what to do. It was rather bizarre.</p>
<p>^That is actually fairly common in both pageants and other forms of “stage moms”. Really screams (at least to me) that the moms/dads wish they could be the ones on stage.</p>
<p>Didn’t the stage dad say at one point, “When she’s on stage, it’s like I’m on stage”?</p>
<p>I watch it once in a while with some of my friends in the dorm. Definitely like watching a train look–you can’t look away.</p>
<p>I remember the first time I saw the show, looking over at my mom and thanking her for never making my sister or me do anything like that.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This. I mean goodness, I still get anxious about waxing MY eyebrows at 20 (and I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years). I can’t imagine putting a little girl through that. Do their eyebrows even NEED shaping? I doubt it.</p>
<p>"Jon Benet was in Colorado, wasn’t she? " - Yes, it was in Boulder CO. (It was the only murder in Boulder that year, but it was a tragic case and got a lot of press.) In honesty, it is the only exposure I’ve ever had to a local pageant kid. There may be a lot of them around , but we’ve only heard about the more normal activities - soccer, gymnastics, Olympics of the Mind, etc.</p>