The Pros and Cons of Toddler Beauty Pageants

While many parents adore their pageant contestant toddlers, other parents and non-parents think it’s wrong to allow a young child to compete in beauty pageants. As with anything, there are many pros and cons involved in toddler beauty pageants.

Pros:

• Through performing and speaking in front of a crowd, beauty pageants can give toddlers confidence.
• What little girl doesn’t love getting dressed up! Pageants give toddlers a chance to wear beautiful toddler pageant dresses, get their hair and makeup done, and have fun.
• Losing a pageant can teach children how to handle second place gracefully.
• Most pageants have cash prizes, which can be saved towards their college fund.
• Through pageants, they may become interested in taking dance or singing lessons, or discover something else they love to do.
• Toddlers can form lifelong friends through pageants.

Cons:

• Sometimes when a child doesn’t win, they take the loss personally, and become sad or upset.
• Many people are turned off by the beauty aspects of toddler pageants. For example, glitz pageants require toddlers to have their hair and nails done, an extensive amount of makeup, and sometimes spray tans. Sometimes getting ready for a glitz pageant can take hours, but there are also natural beauty pageants!
• Beauty pageants can become quite expensive. You have to pay the pageant entry fee, and buy a dress, accessories, pay for any hair or nail appointments, possibly buy a wig or a hairpiece, shoes and anything else your toddler might need.
• In order to succeed and win pageants, toddlers must practice walking across the stage, facial expressions, even the way they talk and what they’re going to say.

If your toddler wanted to compete in a pageant, would you let her, why or why not?