Persuasive Essay On Child Beauty Pageants

Title

Dolls with real Tears

Introduction

Spotlights flash across the runway as the next contestant makes her appearance. With 250 000 others all competing for that $10 000 prize, the contestant begins her routine. A routine that her and her pageant trainer had practiced for months; all of which is accompanied with her mother’s sly, snake-like smile. She smiles with those bleached white teeth, blows kisses with plump, pink lips towards her “adoring fans” as she displays her sparkling dress, but deep inside she is crying for the cruelty to end; only for the six-year old girl to continue what she had been doing since she was 18-months old.

Transition

This girl is one of many who have been entering child beauty pageants. And just like that many,

However, in child beauty pageants, the real contest is whether if parents are still able to still distinguish the line between their own needs and the needs of their children. Often when these lines a blurred, parents may engage in behaviors such as abuse and exploitation of this child. “She [Martina Cartwright, Ph.D.] also witnessed parents putting high pressure on their young daughters to look “flawless” and win at all costs, pushing them to adopt an unnatural and adult-like physical appearance and chastising them for poor performance, lack of enthusiasm or a flawed appearance”

Even when Mommy and Daddy are proud of their little sunshine they are still pressured to continue their pageant career. Even when they are famous on television to the point where the whole country know their name they are victims of bullies and sexual abuse.

3. Method of Proof #1: Support what you’ve stated with research

Childhood; it’s all about playing in the sun, socializing with childhood friends, and going to school. However, for contestants of child beauty pageants, childhood was all about the blush, the eyeliner, the lipstick, and the dress. But it’s that missed childhood that causes participants to feel that life has passed them by, that life was short and those years will never be regained. “But my mum would pull me away from my friends and transform me from a tomboy into a beauty queen because she insisted I needed to practise every day” (Breedwell).

4. Transition

One would be considered lucky for only having the feeling of robbed childhood, most participants go into a darker state by which they feel the need to be perfect in every physical way, even if it means putting herself at risk of harming