Why Do Child Beauty Pageants Be Banned

In the United States of America, many young girls under sixteen years old participate in child beauty pageant, having the most beautiful girl in their mind, as Olive, the young heroine of the movie “Little Miss Sunshine,” did. They eagerly prepare for the contest with their family; they have their hair tightly permed and put on high-heeled shoes and gorgeous sexy dress that do not suit girls in such ages, in order to be even a little more beautiful than the girls who will be together on the stage. Some people protest that such child beauty pageants should be banned. This is seemed to be an extremely self-centered insistence; for its main reasons are as follows:

1. Infants and girls are objectified.
2. They are judged against sexualized ideals.
3. Pageants badly affect children’s emotional and psychological development.

The first one could never be a reason to deprive children who want to participate in pageants by their own choice of their chance of doing so, because it is not children themselves but their parents and other adults who treat them as

Child beauty pageants, on the other hand, do not have such fatal influence on them. It is certainly quite natural that many parents wish for their children to grow up to be “wholesome,” but children also have their own will, no matter how young they are. If they want to participate in beauty pageants, parents should not restrict them because of their unilateral desire or the social ethics. This is the very objectification of their children, which happens by overprotection. Thus, the protest that child beauty pageants should be banned does not have any logical reasons. Some regulations and some reasons of them are, however, grounded on such ill-founded “theory.” The theory like that generally has characteristics in violation of liberalism as