Child beauty pageants clearly cater to the ambitions of parents, not children. Sometimes you have parents carrying babies who can't walk onto the stage. Some parents have built trophy rooms in their homes. The hardware can accumulate, since each entrant normally gets a crown or trophy simply for participating, and the average child in Levey's study went to five pageants per year. Mothers and daughters sometimes wear matching outfits.
Pageants can be costly.
However, only 17 percent of the mothers acknowledged competitiveness in interviews. Parents of higher socioeconomic status were more likely to admit that they entered their daughters to teach them how to compete in the real world. We need competition to keep the idiots out of the workforce. A troubling question remains regarding what this competition is actually about. And I don't think that should be allowed.