My little copy: Why children are dressed and painted like adults
margarita virova
Building relationships with your own body - an important stage in the development of personality, and it is not surprising that children face issues of beauty as early as preschool age. But, as in the case of adults, these issues do not allow children to solve on their own. Children's appearance is becoming a powerful advertising weapon and the object of commercialization. We tell how children are under the gun of adult standards of beauty and what this means for a child.
A strong emphasis on beauty can distort the development of a child’s values in favor of a functional attitude towards oneself.
One of the latest news that excited the beauty of the Internet, was the emergence of the blogger Charlie Rose, who records completely program video tutorials for today's fashion on the “unicorn party” and festival make-up, reviews favorite products and shares tips. The girl differs from others like her in that she is only five years old. Her video is quite digestible shot and edited, and the heroine herself in the frame exactly repeats the grimaces of more adult colleagues: the fact that older people help the girl can be seen with the naked eye. Children's spontaneity and love for dissecting mother's shadows and lipsticks are well adjusted in the direction of the already known and popular format. The first fans of Charlie already have, and what she does, many are only delight and affection. Meanwhile, the question of whether it is safe for children to be infatuated by their own appearance according to the patterns of the adult world remains open.
Every year critics are under a barrage of children's beauty contests, which, in spite of everything, continue to take place everywhere. First of all, such events and their organizers are accused of the sexualization of children's images. Great discussions in this regard were rewarded with the TLC channel show “Toddlers and Tiaras”: the screenshots from this TV competition of beauty were clearly seen in disturbed columns and news. In 2011, a three-year-old participant of the show appeared on the screen in a dress that echoes the cult outfit from the movie "Pretty Woman" - a blatant case in today's times.
The fate of the spin-off called “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” a reality show in which it was proposed to watch the life of the “non-standard” winner of the competition Alana Thompson, turned out to be even more strange and terrible. The lion's share of what is happening on the screen was devoted to the attempts of a full girl and her mother to lose weight, unhealthy family relationships turned inside out, and ended with an urgent closing of the TV program due to rumors that Alana’s mother had begun a secret relationship with a man accused of seducing her eldest daughter. In 2016, they covered up Toddlers and Tiaras.
Sexualization is a big, but not the only problem of increased attention to child beauty. Psychologist Daria Grosheva explains that the very situation in which parents decorate and dress children up to the public has very specific consequences for the child’s psyche: "Children, at least before adolescence, develop self-esteem, and it consists of many factors. It feels like personality, awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, understanding of what kind of person you are, what you like, what you don’t like, how you differ from others, as well as an awareness of your value and significance beyond evaluations and contests. " Daria says that children are looking for their future style based on their character and preferences, and for themselves thinking about this in their lives, there should also be space.
Children's beauty contests, and in general a demonstration of the child’s appearance, make it impossible to form mental stability. Parents can support him in every way and say that their child, in spite of everything, the most beloved, it does not matter whether he loses or not. And yet, it is impossible to fully control the process of mental development, the psychologist emphasizes. In addition, a strong emphasis on beauty can deform the development of a child’s values in favor of a functional attitude toward oneself, and heightened attention to the child forms narcissistic personality traits.
In the presentation of a child’s image in the media and in advertising, the same “adult” standards most often work: just look at the covers of magazines and photos about children's fashion. For advertising, looking for cheerful, energetic and cute children without speech defects or excess weight. Often, children dress up as adults, make them complex hair, whiten their teeth and smooth the skin. Celebrity children, dressed up as "small copies" of their parents, regularly flash in fashionable selections: Beyonce and Blue Ivy, Kim and North. In the very structure of children's thinking, appearance and image do not occupy much space at all: as long as they get to know the world, there really are more important things in their life, therefore, the empty decision space is occupied by projections of adults. Adults choose what their children will look like by studying the offers of other adults - those who produce clothes and accessories, offer children's hairdressers' services and retouch photos of babies for packages of diapers. Thus, real living children in these processes are not even involved, but serve only as models for the turnover of adult ambitions. Children simply have to remain cute blue-eyed angels who will have a chance to decide on their own what to do with it only when they grow up. As it happened, for example, with the young stars of Disney TV shows.
Our body is important, and the child should be able to study it without relying on stereotypes.
Patterns from the world of notorious adults easily penetrate into the children's world, and the child begins to unknowingly master them. Thus, the problem of eating disorders among adolescents does not lose relevance from year to year, and according to an Australian study, even girls of preschool age often express a desire to lose weight without explaining it with dissatisfaction with their appearance - just the very desire to lose weight firmly and by default has become part of our daily culture and image of relationships with the body. Imitating adults, children begin to try on derogatory standards. It is difficult to answer questions about which spears often break: from what age a child begins to freely dispose of his appearance, is it worth encouraging the first experiments with cosmetics or is it better to postpone it all until a more conscious age? It is probably worth starting with separating the parental and social desires from the curiosity of the child himself, who may well want to join the "big" world, smearing lipstick on her mother's face. For him, sexual and social meanings of make-up and jewelery are not available yet, and most often it is a game and creativity.
The whole secret is that we live, of course, not in a vacuum, and the child takes the first steps towards studying and assessing their own appearance, focusing on adults. Daria Grosheva warns that if someone from the authoritative family and relatives of the child speaks too much about the beauty or "flaws" of the child, even in an indirect form ("You need to tie the bow higher, and that face is completely round," "Who is this, Our chubby came! "), he may well have a fixation on his own attractiveness. A psychologist describes a healthy relationship with appearance as the ability to accept one's difference from others, not to consider beauty as the most important advantage and not to compare oneself with others. One way or another, our body is important, and the child should have the opportunity to study it without relying on stereotypes. But the love of a little girl for beautiful hairstyles and many hours of sessions in the make-up artist's chair before the beauty contest with its ugly wrong side are different things.