Good evening friends. I hope all of you have had a great day. I actually had some work to do today and didn’t get a chance to send out an email before this. I came home from work, changed clothes and went out to mow. Thankfully, the rain held off until I got half of the back yard mowed. Maybe I can get the rest of it mowed tomorrow. I am planning to go to TJ’s next week and if I can’t get it all mowed before I go, I will have to hire a bush hog when I get back.
You may think I have chosen a strange subject for this email. Over the weekend, several comments about the reality tv show “Toddlers in Tiaras” were made on facebook by people that were seeing the program for the first time. None of the comments were good. Most of the comments were about how deranged the parents must be to do this to their child. If you’ve never watched the program, you need to do it just once. I can almost guarantee once will be all you will be able to stomach. I’m sure you all remember the story of JonBenet Ramsey. She was the 6 year old child found murdered in her basement several years ago. She was one of these toddlers in tiaras. She was called “a painted baby, a sexualized toddler beauty queen”. The pictures of these little girls really disturb me. They are painted to look like….for lack of a better word….a child prostitute. They have on makeup and clothes that cheapen them. These girls are babies!! Their childhood is gone. The few times I’ve watched the show, I would get so angry that I just wanted to reach into the television and strangle the mothers. Some of the time the daddies were there too, but it was always the mother that was doing the pushing and cheering on. You see these babies getting ready to go on and “strut their stuff” and you see some of them crying because they don’t want to do it. You see some of them with a real competitive attitude and only want to win. It really breaks my heart.
I firmly believe this is an industry that needs to be looked at real closely. These parents are prostituting their children in almost every sense of the word. The babies are taught how to pose, thrusting out their hips provocatively, pouting their lips, arching their backs to display their childish chests. It comes pretty close to turning my stomach. And when the camera pans to the mother, she is doing all of the moves she wants her daughter to do. I think these mothers are so willing to subject their daughters to this lifestyle because they wanted to be a model or Miss Teenage America or Miss America, etc. when they were young and weren’t able, for whatever reason, to succeed. I don’t think these babies need to be with parents that steal their childhood this way. In the first sentence of this paragraph I called this an industry and I feel that is really what it is. It takes a considerable amount of money to participate in these pageants. The parents will tell you they have taken our personal loans, used their credit cards to the limit and sometimes even taken out a first or second mortgage on their homes to finance this game. Most of the time, the winner gets a huge trophy. I remember seeing one of the episodes last year showing the winner and she had several trophies already. Her parents had turned one of the rooms in their house into a trophy room. This particular little girl had the competitive attitude I mentioned. As the reporter was interviewing her, she was being a spoiled little brat. She threw things across the room, knocked some of the trophies off the shelves, threw one into a mirror and the mother just stood there. Then the little girl told her mother to “get off your butt and clean up this mess”. What kind of young woman is this little girl going to grow up to be? What about the other children in families like this. In the same episode I just mentioned, there was another daughter in the family. She was a couple of years older and a little on the chubby side. She was totally ignored. Her sister told her she wasn’t pretty enough to be a model and the mother agreed with her. Think about the negative view this little girl has of herself.
I don’t know what can be done about the exploitation of these babies, but something should be. Maybe it will be as simple as enough people getting upset about it, but I doubt it. It’s been going on so many years, I really don’t see it stopping. Maybe if these babies were taken away from these parents and the parents put into jail, that might be a deterrent.
I hope all of you have a good night. Talk to you again soon.
boutlaw@carolinaregion.com
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