Should Children Be Allowed To Enter In Beauty Pageants

Pageants have been a controversial topic since the start of them. The idea of a pageant really is degrading. Girls compete to be prettier than the ones in competition around them. The winner receives a crown and is made out to be a queen for doing nothing but walking across a stage. Character has no importance, nor does skill. Children participating in pageants are too young to understand what is really happening. Girls should be required to be at least 16 years old to enter in beauty contests. Young girls who partake in beauty pageants develop serious emotional problems from doing so. Pageants over exaggerate the importance of outer beauty. They undermine the importance of character and intellectual development. Wolfe quotes Meg Gehrke’s argument “it results in dependency on men and lowered self-esteem and sense of self-worth" (438). It is even worse that this is during a child’s main developmental stages. Instead of learning positive values, the child begins to believe that their outer image is the most important image. Developing this thought process leads to major insecurity in the future. A study done by Wonderlich, Ackard, and Henderson

A lot has to go through in preparation for these pageants. The girls need their eyebrows waxed, their teeth whitened, and their skin tanned. Some of these things are not only painful but can be life threatening after several years of repeated use. By the time a child reaches adulthood, the skin has a likely hood of being severely damaged or invaded by cancer from frequent exposure to UV light. The consistent whitening of the teeth wears on the child’s enamel eventually and causes great sensitivity. Wolfe writes about a painful scene on the show Toddlers, “Later on. Mom helps Aubrey whiten her teeth for the first time. Seconds after placing the whitening strip on Aubrey's teeth, Aubrey begins to