Child Beauty Pageants Argumentative Essay

Child Beauty Pageants: Do Caked Faces Take the Cake?

“Click, click, click.” The sound of a six year old prancing on stage in five inch stilettos, pounds of makeup on their once pretty, raw faces, and self tan packed on their skin. This is a scene from a child beauty pageant. These pageants encourage young girls to become someone they are not. Many young woman that have participated in pageants as young girls, still do not love their bodies. Yet, the industry is multiplying quickly. Although child beauty pageants teach participants valuable life skills, in the midst of that, pageants set a unrealistic standard for beauty causing young adolescents to develop self-esteem issues and use too many self-altering substances.

Beauty pageants cause self-esteem

For example, this author stated,“When children compete, they develop confidence and learn skills such as poise, good sportsmanship and, in most cases, how to lose gracefully. Overall, the experience boosts their self-esteem”(Are child beauty pageants beneficial for children?") Eventually, trying to become “perfect” takes over the brain. Therefore, the life skills they once learned from beauty pageants as a child, go out the window. A mother of child in pageants said, “... the children 's pageant world "brings a lot of kids out of their shells"(“Innocence in Evening Gowns"). Even though children could become more outgoing, in the process of that, a child receives unrealistics expectations of their body. The issues that develop from taking part in pageants as a child, overpower the life skills taught from pageants. To illustrate, one author states, “Unrealistic expectations to be thin, physically beautiful, and perfect are at the heart of some disordered eating behaviors and body dissatisfaction” (Cartwright). Children who compete, spend an abundance of hours trying to become “flawless”. Hence the reason they completely forget about the skills they learned in pageants when they were younger. In this article, the author stated, “Opponents sag pageants put too much emphasis on looks. ‘Many of these kids grow up with a never-ending drive for physical perfection,’ Martina Cartwright tells JS. Her research on child pageants was recently published in a medical journal. ‘This can lead to eating disorders and poor self-esteem’” (Cartwright). This quote expresses that the pageant is judged on looks, instead of one’s attributes and qualities. Beauty pageants teach participants skills that could be used later in life, however, eating disorders and other issues, that materialized from child beauty pageants, suppress the life skills previously