Child Pageants May be Worse for Kids Than We Thought

Folks, it’s a 2 hour and 45 minute episode. Holy shit.

It also happens to be the first time in years we’ve had a significant audio issue—that we didn’t notice until the recording was done. We apologize for the slightly annoying audio quality, but we promise this one is worth it!

With such a long episode, I can’t really get into the details in a blog post, but this one was an exercise in finding out that, sometimes, you can do a bunch of nuanced research and the conclusion could still come out as un-nuanced as can be.

Okay, well, not UN-nuanced, but the findings were pretty clear—even clearer than they seemed at the start. The episode starts with an hour-long deep dive into child mental, physical, emotional, and sexual development, in which we found that a lot of parenting behavior is… at odds with the way children’s brains work at their various stages of development. In a nutshell, the gist is this: Human brains are learning machines, and their stages of development dictate how and what they can learn. Young children are built to learn in breadth, not depth, and is generally best nurtured by developing a health relationship with learning and providing stability, consistency, and support.

Pageantry… doesn’t check any of those boxes. Not on physical, mental, emotional, or sexual levels. It doesn’t provide anything that other activities don’t more effectively teach, it’s harmful to every area of cognitive development (especially when done repeatedly), and, on top of all that, it actively exposes children to an environment where they are inherently more at risk of abuse (in all forms). If the question is whether pageants are good for kids, the answer is clear regardless of the number of peer-reviewed studies: Absolutely not.

This argument, for clarity, is not that nothing positive can come from experiences in child pageantry. Several people provided relatively normal if not actively positive memories, and I’m not trying to take away their experiences. For example, one woman candidly spoke of her pageant participation being the emotional and artistic outlet for her mother’s suicide, and she felt that she was able to make a positive difference in the world for the influence it allowed her. These experiences are real, and my findings can’t unwrite their history. But even harmful experiences can yield positive memories sometimes. If you leave an abusive partner, you can acknowledge the good times without letting them override the bad—they’re still harmful, and they need to be left in the past.

Children are unable to quantify the damage being done when they participate in pageants, and, because they have been largely normalized, pageant parents aren’t aware that such harm is possible. I understand, and my advocation here isn’t to punish parents who decide to do this. That would be reactive and unproductive—but parents are in a position where they should always been seeking to learn more about effective parenting. The relationship between the qualities of pageants and children’s developmental needs is clear: In the long run, they do lasting damage to a child’s developing worldview and self-image.

When children are entered into beauty pageants, they’re not just learning about what beauty standards are. They’re learning what the concept of beauty is, that beauty is valuable (sometimes in a monetary sense), what kind of people are considered beautiful, that being beautiful is the way you “win,” that "winning is more important than physical comfort, that bending the rules about safety and appropriateness are okay when it means you can win, and a million other implicit messages. They don’t have to be told these things outright—children’s brains don’t work that way. These are messages they can glean from pattern recognition, from simply being in an environment where these are the core belief system. And, on top of it all, because their parents are helping them into that environment, they believe that their parents think the activities within pageants are normal. That authority solidifies in children’s minds that beauty pageants are normal and, therefore, that the things they learn from beauty pageants are also normal.

You can see how this would be a problem.

I won’t spoil all the fun here, but suffice to say we get INTO it. And, if that isn’t enough to tempt you, you’ll get to hear some juicy anecdotes about my (Brooke’s) personal life. It’s a scoop, I tell ya.

If this episode taught you something new, let us know! I learned so much while researching it, and I really hope I can pass some of that discovery on to you. My sincere hope is that, with people learning so much about child development and care, we can start building a world where people nurture the next generations the way the need to be. It gives me some hope. Thanks, folks.

B