While a multi-decade longitudinal study cannot yet be conducted on all the many children who have appeared on “Toddlers in Tiaras” it’s safe to assume that some, if not all, of these young lives have been ruined.
Each episode of this show revolves around a handful of mothers and fathers preparing daughters (aged 2 through early adolescence) for beauty pageant competition. These babies are painted, decorated, and spray-tanned until they look like bizarre sexualized Muppets. Because of the cyclical nature of pageant competition (most Pageant mothers are former pageant babies) we have a pretty good guess at what will become of these girls.
They’ll put on about seventy pounds, live in the same crappy town they grew up in, and stake all their self-worth on the possibility of their infant daughters being given a plastic tiara for looking cute.
Recently, an even more disturbing case of toddler makeovers has surfaced. Sheena Upton claimed that her admission to giving her 8-year-old daughter Botox injections was nothing more than a paid publicity stunt. However, the horrific idea of a child receiving painful appearance-altering injections isn’t so far-fetched; the show also featured a girl getting her eyebrows waxed while she cried and pleaded to avoid it. The parent of that child admitted that her skin had been torn off during a botched eyebrow waxing a few months prior.