The Effects Of Beauty Pageants

To start with, beauty pageants for children are detrimental to their psychology. Kids are programmed to be ultra-conscious about their body shapes. Experts say that participation in activities that focus on physical appearance can influence an individual’s self-esteem, self-worth, and body image (Wonderlich et al., 2005). This makes the contestants experience issues concerning their self-identity after they retire from the pageant scene. They struggle with eating disorders, physical appearance, dieting, and perfection during their adulthood. Not all participants experience body issues when they become old, but most of them do.

It has been noted that most of the young girls who develop image obsessions are psychologically affected when they

Beauty pageants for young girls feed the obsession with beauty and outer image, while forcing more essential ideas like education and intellect to take a backseat. The kids’ education is affected because they use most of their time practicing modeling poses as well as walk for the beauty pageant competition. It clearly shows that these kids do not have enough time to invest in their studies as the contests take place during weekends, “yet despite their primary purpose as entertainment, these contests are also steeped in a local zeitgeist in which the quest for an education is an orienting factor of life” (Billings, 2011, p. 295). This can be named as a betrayal of the trust that the children have agreed to their parents to give a secure future. It is annoying that mothers use their young ones to live their dreams, exploiting their daughters ' sexuality for fame and fortune, and along the way inflicting serious psychological and emotional damage on them that played out in very public ways?” (Durham, 2014, p.6). Despite the fact that many parents, especially mothers, are forcing their daughters to participate in beauty pageant competitions, it is not safe (Durham, 2014). Some of the contestants live with the fear of being kidnapped and even killed. This happens because there have been cases of young girls who have been victims in murder incidents. For instance, over a decade ago, there was a tragic story of Jan Benet Ramsey all over the mass media. She was a 6-year-old girl who contested in various pageants and later was kidnapped and murdered. This raised a lot of questions about the security of the young kids who take part in the