Children's beauty pageants promote the "image is everything" persona and create unhealthy thinking habits in young children. Parents may enter children as soon as they can sit up on their own, so the children often grow up thinking that being dressed up and judged is the norm. They have no say in anything because the parents are the "adults" and can make their kids do basically whatever they want. What parents do to their children to make them win the pageants is sickening. Examples; - Shaving the children's legs - Spray tanning - Putting children on crash diets - Giving them "flippers", or veneers to improve teeth appearance - Bleaching teeth (baby teeth!) - Plucking and tweezing eyebrows - Caking on makeup - Giving them hair extensions - Dressing them in provocative clothing - Creating provocative routines for the children to do on stage When children are exposed to these values early on, they are more likely to grow up with the "looks are everything" mentality. These children are being put on DIETS - can you imagine the effect of this later in life, perhaps during the teenage years when self-esteem is rocky? Simply asking that these pageants be removed from television does not prevent the pageants from occurring in the first place. We must take action to ban the pageants all together. These pageants can cause permanent damage to the children's mental-well being and exploit young girls provocatively. Please sign the petition to ban children's beauty pageants!