Who's to Blame for Child Beauty Pageants?

IT IS FINISHED.

After weeks of learning about everything from child development to criminology to sociology, I’ve finally closed the book on child beauty pageants. We covered child beauty pageant origins, rules, and practices, child physical, cognitive, and sexual development from infancy to teens, the effects of pageantry on developing brains, and now we wrap it all up by asking the big societal question: Why are we still doing these pageants? It’s immensely clear that there isn’t anything about pageants that’s uniquely helpful to kids, and there’s plenty that’s uniquely harmful. But despite the research, the public judgment, the bad press from Toddlers and Tiaras and media like it, masses of parents enroll their kids in these shows. Why?

It’s complicated and rooted in some pretty dense psychological stuff, but here it is in a nutshell: Because it’s what they were conditioned to do. Pretty unsatisfying, right? The only place we can really pin blame is the system that cultivated the minds that are attracted to child beauty pageants—namely, Capitalism. Again. It’s always Capitalism.

More specifically, it’s the consumerist ideology that convinced hundreds of years of humans that the most they could hope to do with their lives is sell them for the highest dollar amount. When the options are to make money or die, it makes sense that parents would pressure their kids into the same mindset. It comes from a place of fear of the world as they see it and blind acceptance of the status quo; parents in poverty want their kids to escape poverty, and parents with power want their kids to keep that power. Instead of critically deconstructing the reality they’ve been conditioned to accept, they demand their kids accept that same reality to avoid what the parents believe is a fate worse than death: Loss.

I’m not going to go into the details here because I’m really excited to share the full picture we created in the episode. I’ve never worked harder on an episode series, and I’m really proud of how it all came together. But if you need more convincing, this episode runs the gamut of achievement by proxy distortion, neutralization theory in criminology, the myth of childhood innocence, an overview of the sociological definition of culture (and a breakdown of beauty pageant culture per that definition), and a final understanding of what exactly the problem really is.

Yeah, child beauty pageants are bad in pretty much every sense, and a perfect world would see them completely dissolved. But aren’t you curious about how we got here? And, more importantly, how we can get out?

Oh, and did I mention my recent serial child prank caller called me during the show? It’s pretty cute.