So let's talk about Honey Boo Boo.
The youngster in question is Alana Thompson, also known as
Honey Boo Boo, star of TLC’s “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” a reality show that allows
viewers a peek into the lives of Alana and her lovable, rough-and-tumble
family. The show is a huge hit, despite
being lambasted and derided by the press, which has struggled to explain its
strange appeal. Having made a name for
herself as a beauty-pageant contestant on “Toddlers & Tiaras,” Alana does
not, at first blush, seem to be the kind of kid Americans usually embrace. She’s no Suri Cruise. So what accounts for her show’s persistent
popularity?
Certainly little-girl beauty pageants—a $5 billion industry—have
been much in the public consciousness of late.
With the movie “Little Miss Sunshine” and a slew of TV reality shows,
people seem to be fascinated with the whole notion of pageants and the way in
which ordinary-looking little girls are poked and prodded, primped, slathered,
festooned, painted, sprayed, and spackled into odd-looking simulations of adult
women, only without the breasts. I count
myself among those who, coming upon “Little Miss Perfect” one morning when I
was home in bed with the flu, was unable to look away.
Why is that?
Part of it has to do with the transformations of the little
girls, which is startling, to say the least.
People love makeovers, after all: they love the idea that something
pedestrian can be transformed into something shimmering and new and barely
recognizable. Perhaps we even like to
imagine what a sparkly dress, Plasticine hair, fake white teeth (called
“flippers” for the pre-adolescent set who are missing their baby teeth), and
makeup garishly applied might do for us.
Haven’t we all fantasized that with knowledgeable assistance and just
the right accessories, we might be coaxed into an approximation of Audrey
Hepburn? (Or is that just me?)
But of course, it’s more than that. The TV shows in particular have found a way
to allow viewers (who are often mothers) to indulge in a cherished pastime:
criticizing other mothers. The mothers
of little girls who compete in pageants are easy to hate. Often, they are shown yelling at their
daughters, exhorting them to smile, make eye contact with judges, twirl
prettily, pay attention, stop crying, be quiet, hush up. They promise disingenuously that if their
little girls can’t behave properly, they’ll just pack up the suitcases and go
home. They critique their children’s
imperfections with withering contempt.
(“She’s just so clumsy!”) They
pump them full of candy and soda and so-called “energy drinks” to insure an
energetic performance onstage.
And then, there’s the aspect of all this that we don’t say
out loud: Many of these women live in modest houses, often in small towns,
often in the south. They speak
ungrammatically, with accents.
And—heaven forbid—some of them are fat.
In short, they are just the kind of people that more
affluent, educated suburbanites can feel good about hating. Because they are different. Because they aren’t like us. Because we would never do what they do.
Is this true?
I raised my children in a Bay Area suburb where it was (and
is) de rigueur for kids to begin their athletic careers at the age of four, on
the soccer field. Because I worried that
my quiet, sedentary son might be left out socially if he didn’t participate, I
signed him up. I then spent the next
four months watching a pack of kids swarm across a field without the slightest
sense of what they were doing, let alone where the ball was. (Half the time, I couldn’t even see
Evan. Usually, he was at the wrong end
of the field, looking for bugs in the grass.)
All the while, well-heeled parents shouted encouragement from the
sidelines. Sometimes it sounded
encouraging. Sometimes it sounded like
the kind of rage that would get you escorted out of a professional hockey game.
My son played soccer for almost ten years, and volleyball
throughout high school and college.
During that time, I saw a lot of ugliness, as well as out-and-out emotional
brutality: parents who lobbied coaches to make sure their superstar didn’t have
to be on a team with a kid who was slow or uncoordinated; coaches who tried to
get parents to discourage their kids from playing because “they’ll never be any
good anyway”; kids who refused to sit next to a teammate who allowed a goal or
screwed up a corner kick. At a
volleyball game, I heard parents (who lived in the next town) laughing about
how their kids were beating ours because their town was “richer.” During my son’s single, ill-fated Little
League season, I saw an assistant coach put his arm over his son’s shoulders
after the kid had pitched a near-perfect game and the other team had won
anyway. I drew closer, hoping to
eavesdrop on a sweet father-son moment.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” the father was whispering. “What the fuck were you doing out
there?” The kid was crying. He was nine years old.
And don’t get me started on my daughter’s experiences with
gymnastics.
It’s easy to think that allowing my kids to participate in
hometown sports is nothing like allowing little girls to dress up in ball gowns
and wink and blow kisses at strange men with clipboards. After all, sports are about learning rules,
fostering camaraderie, becoming team players, building healthy bodies. They are about developing competencies,
whereas beauty pageants are about being judged for what you look like, which has nothing to do with competence and
everything to do with the luck of the draw.
Right?
Maybe not. David
Elkind certainly doesn’t think so. A
professor emeritus at Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child, The Power of Play, and All Grown Up and No Place to Go, Elkind believes that modern-day
parenting has stressed children to the breaking point, depriving them of the
childhoods necessary for appropriate development. “The pressure to grow up fast, to achieve
early in the area of sports, academics, and social interaction, is very great
in middle-class America,” he writes in 1981’s groundbreaking The Hurried Child. “There is no room today for the ‘late
bloomers,’ the children who come into their own later in life rather than
earlier.”
Consider this excerpt from sports writer John Underwood,
cited by Elkind:
Sports-psychologist Bruce Ogelvie
laments the sickening arrogance of Little League coaches, too many of whom are
unqualified. Some coaches, says another
psychologist, Thomas Tatlio, even “think sports is war.” They make eight-year-olds sit on the bench
while others play, learning nothing beyond the elitism of win-at-all-costs
sport. Token participation—an inning in
right field, a couple of minutes in the fourth quarter—can be equally
demoralizing.
To visit on small heads the
pressure to win… is indecent. To dress
children up like pros in costly outfits is ridiculous. In so doing, we take away many of the
qualities that competitive sports are designed to give to the growing process.
Elkind goes on to say, “Generally it is parent need, not a
child’s authentic wish, that pushes children into team sports at an early age.”
And suddenly, the affluent suburban parents who laud their
children’s talents on the tennis team begin to bear an eerie resemblance to
Honey Boo Boo’s mother, June Shannon, who likes to “scratch her bugs” and is
happy to provide her little pageant queen with the “go-go juice” she needs to
show herself to best advantage.
My point is not to denigrate the hallowed, untouchable
institution of sports in America. Nor is
it to instill guilt into the hearts of already beleaguered parents who adore
their children and want nothing more than to do right by them.
My point is that our demonization of the mothers of child
pageant contestants bears examination. When
we laugh at them, or say we’re nothing like them, or roll our eyes at the way
they have forced their children to become miniature adults, we’re not being
completely honest. Perhaps we are using
these women to avoid seeing ourselves as we really are.
There are plenty of things not to like about child beauty
pageants: the
emphasis on appearance, the sexualization of little girls, the horrific
insistence on "practicing" and rehearsing routines performed by
children who are barely old enough to flush a toilet or button a shirt, the
unbridled competitiveness, the weird way that social class factors into it all.
A small study conducted by the
University of Minnesota’s Anna L. Wonderlich, Diann M. Ackard, and Judith B.
Henderson found that adult women who had competed in beauty pageants as
children scored higher on body dissatisfaction, interpersonal distrust, and
impulse dysregulation than non-participants, and showed a trend toward greater
ineffectiveness.
But let’s not kid ourselves. June Shannon loves her little girl, just as
you love yours and I love mine. The
problem is that somehow, we’ve all been coerced into believing that we must
teach our very young children about competitiveness and
winning.
Sports exert such a hold on the modern
imagination that we have turned any number of activities into them. Dance
is no longer an art form: children are now on dance teams.
The same can be said of chess, martial arts, a cappella singing, and a host of
other activities that used to be pursued for reasons other than the desire to
be better at them than other people. One might argue that little-girl
pageants take this idea to its logical, if ludicrous, conclusion.
Now, you can win a trophy for being the best smiler and winker. We
have, at long last, made winning available to all.
And that,
I think, is the crux of the whole thing. The little girls who win the
Ultimate Grand Supreme titles (an exercise in hyperbole if ever there was one)
aren’t really very good at anything. But pageants allow anyone with the
money to spend to compete on an even playing field. That is what
twenty-first-century America teaches its citizens. And that is what twenty-first century mothers teach their children.
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