The Pain Of Pageants

How much pain and discomfort are these parents of the daughters in Toddlers and Tiaras willing to put them through to make them look “presentable” to the judges? Some of the things that I have seen, says a lot. From making their daughters wear corsets, to waxing their eyebrows, these parents really put the looks of their children over their well – being.
On the only episode I watched of this show, I saw a mother getting her daughter spray tanned and having her eyebrows touched up by what they told her felt like having cardboard rubbed over your face. It wasn’t supposed to hurt but something went awry and the little girl almost started crying. It was almost like she felt like she shouldn’t or even couldn’t cry, because her mother would frown on that sort of behavior. It seems like these mothers will do anything to make their daughters look good and tell them the same thing. That beauty is pain. This is teaching the girls a bad lesson; you don’t have to do things that hurt you to look good.
In US Weekly magazine, the headline is, “Toddlers and Tiaras Forces Daughter to Get Highlights.” The highlights that were given were “peroxide provided blonde ones.” The daughter clearly did not want to go through with it and told her mother that she didn’t want to and that she wanted to keep her natural hair color. Her mother tried to distract her daughter by asking her about her friends but Carley just told her she didn’t have any friends. This had negative effects when Carley ripped off her fake eyelashes on stage, which her mother was not at all happy about and scolded her daughter about after the pageant. This shows that the girls who do not want to have these unpleasant things done to them, they take it out on their mothers. The children reluctantly do what their mothers tell them will win them pageants, even if this means that it causes them pain or discomfort. I also don’t think that it is healthy to start having your daughter’s hair highlighted at such a young age. People say that dyeing your hair can have negative affects, especially when doing it often.
In another article in US Weekly magazine titled, “Toddlers and Tiaras Mom Makes Daughter Wear Corset” Marlo, mother of 11 year old Sydney, puts her into a tightly – bound corset. Her mother is quoted saying, “It doesn’t matter if you can breathe or not! It only matters if you look beautiful!” This obviously is not putting her daughter’s best interest to heart. This is something that has not been around for a very long time because it was a crazy thing that women did to make themselves look thinner. It was very uncomfortable and even made some women faint from not being able to breathe. Doing this to an 11 year old for a pageant is just ridiculous. This shows that pageant mom’s will go to great lengths to have their daughters looking “pageant perfect.”
Along the same lines as the eyebrow touch – up, momotics.com posts about a scene put up from the show on this site of a young girl getting her eyebrows waxed. Watching this just made me cringe. The little girl was crying and saying she didn’t want to have it done, but her mother was persistent and even tried to bribe her with candy. They said that during a different waxing, the wax was too hot and it ripped off her skin, and she is scared to have them done again. The mother says after she is done that normally she would have held her daughter down and ripped them off herself which is just an unbelievable thing to watch.