Top 5 Lessons Normal Parents Can Glean from this Disturbing TV Show

As parents, the television program Toddlers & Tiaras is so offensive that we can hardly watch it, let alone relate to it. After all, this is a show depicting the horrifying phenomenon of children’s beauty pageants. Crazed, crown-obsessed parents who dress up their children like “living dolls” complete with hairpieces, false eyelashes, heavy makeup, spray tanner, and hyper-sexualized outfits seem, to most people, like cult members from another planet.

Under the guise of glitz, fun, and even confidence-building, pageant-parents are setting their daughters up for a lifetime of insecurity and out-of-reach fame…relationships and pursuits that can be unattainable and unsustainable.

However, there is much we can learn from “Toddlers & Tiaras” when it comes to helping our girls build a healthy self-esteem. Children’s beauty pageants promote unhealthy competition between girls, the cultivation of negative personality traits, such as acting like a “diva,” and an over-emphasis on appearance and physicality. While these pageants may be overly exaggerated in the name of entertainment, the truth is even “normal” parents can engage in these offending behaviors in a smaller degree.

Here are the top five lessons all parents can take from these pageant parent-monsters to avoid nurturing a drama queen and help their daughters build authentic and long-lasting self-esteem.

1. Praise intellectual, creative, and athletic accomplishments. First, these accomplishments take hard work and commitment, exactly the qualities we want to cultivate in our children. Second, these activities bring endless rewards to our daughters throughout their lives. By encouraging these healthy goals, we are setting up our daughters to build fulfilling lives based on meaningful, rather than superficial, qualities. It is easy to fall into the trap of praising our girls for being pretty or cute, or for wearing a trendy outfit. However, as parents, it is our duty to show our daughters the kinds of accomplishments we strongly value.
2. Praise displays of kind and egalitarian behaviors. Sometimes parents talk about their daughters (especially during the mean tween years) as people who, were they roommates, would be asked to leave. In order to raise the kind of young women we would want to befriend, let alone live with, we need show them that we value congenial behaviors. Grace and manners are about equality, not hierarchy.
3. Provide incentives that are based on factors they can control. Instead of bartering with our daughters as pageant parents often do on the show—you’ll get a cute little kitten if you win the crown—offer incentives to good behaviors and accomplishments that they can control. For example, instead of offering a reward for earning a particular grade, offer the reward based on how much time they spend studying. Offering incentives for things dependent on the judgment of others sets your daughter up for a lifetime of seeking external validation. Instead, teach her how to develop her own sense of self-worth not beholden to the judgment of others.
4. Promote positive relationships with other girls. Girls need girlfriends. Healthy relationships with peers can greatly strengthen the quality of our daughters’ lives. Girlfriends can offer support, a springboard for self-reflection, and companionship. Destructive patterns of communication, such as gossiping, teasing, jealousy, and comparison, should be discouraged as we urge our girls to value and attend to the quality of their friendships.
5. Treat your kids with compassion without projecting your insecurities onto them. Easier said than done, but it is possible. It’s quite obvious that pageant-parents on “Toddlers & Tiaras” are trying to live vicariously through their children. Perhaps they were picked on as children, or perhaps their childhood was their happiest time and their adult lives are in some way devoid of personal satisfaction. In any event, these pushy parents certainly don’t present themselves as people to emulate. It’s likely that they are just projecting their own insecurities onto their daughters in the hopes of immediate—and glittery—validation. If so, one might consider that it is unintentional. They may even think they are helping their daughters to build confidence and have fun. The audience knows better.