Are Children Beauty Pageants Wrong or Right?
I personally think children beauty pageants are wrong. To sum up my views * Beauty pageants are already degrading * Children – who are innocent – don’t deserve to be aware or self concious of their looks at such an early age. It is important they can be children. * It’s a lot of pressure on the children, the adults seem to get more benefits * They will grow up with beliefs that only the Western ideal standard of beauty is right.
The long-standing and current overwhelming opinion in the psychology community concerning children’s beauty pageants is that they are not in the best interests of healthy child development. There is enough undue, exaggerated focus on superficial beauty in this culture without children being pitted against each other in a contest of looks. I have heard all the arguments defending these contests and they all appear to be self-serving defenses with no apparent regard to the considerable body of research that demonstrates why they are harmful to kids. I know that people say, “There are other things they’re judged on besides their looks; it teaches them poise, it gives them confidence.” But the hard fact remains they are called BEAUTY pageants and they have been and always will be based on using arbitrary standards of “beauty” to make one contestant better than all the rest. If you sense considerable passion and concern in my reply you are correct. When I think of how fragile kids are as th
