Baby Beauties
For a 5-year-old in an evening gown, the reigning Tiny Miss Clearwater cuts a graceful figure. But as the regional qualifier for America’s Most Beautiful Baby Pageant wound down on Saturday, Miranda Brower, as she is also known, was covered in blue ice cream.
As the sugary goop dribbled down her face and onto her pajamas, Miranda’s 13 aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and siblings who had descended upon The Pier in St. Petersburg to support her in the pageant chattered anxiously. She slid around in her slippers as her retinue steeled itself for the awards ceremony.
The irony was lost on her. Only hours before, she had paraded across the stage, bedecked in a purple satin dress with frilly white lace, white-heeled mary janes, and perfectly-coifed, sponge-curled hair. Now, besmirching her getup -- from the sleepwear category -- and waiting to hear if the judges thought she was cute, Miranda looked unkempt.
From a statistical outlook, the odds were against her. Miranda was one of 55 competitors, all flanked by doting parents crossing their fingers for the big moment. But she seemed unfazed.
“I’m going to get some trophies,” she said. “I already have a whole bunch at home.”
Perhaps the stakes were higher than Miranda realized. The winners of Saturday’s competition would be invited to compete in the national America’s Most Beautiful Baby Pageant, held every September in Cincinnati, Ohio. The spoils for America’s cutest boy and girl are $10,000 college scholarships and a PT Cruiser.
For most at The Pier, though, there would be no spoils. For 53 children, aged infant to 6, consolation meant dinky ribbons, cryptic score sheets and undaunted parental pride. And for most children, that was just fine.
For some frustrated parents, it may not have been enough. While many competitors, especially toddlers and babies, were out for a good time, others’ parents had obviously devoted considerable energy to the pageant.
A few parents painted their children’s faces with makeup. One mom lugged in a crib, which she used as a dressing room for her 15-month-old girl. And several families, such as Miranda’s, delivered sizable peanut galleries of cheerleading relatives from around the state. For them, the competition meant more than a day at the beach.
Several child development experts and a few appalled parents raised the question of where parental pride and competitive zeal run afoul of children’s well-being.
“Just like anywhere else, money can buy anything,” said Richard Chris, whose 11-month-old daughter Olivia, a first-time competitor, did not win any prizes. “The more money you invest, the better your chances are.”
Kyle Pruett, author of Me, Myself, and I, a book on the child’s sense of self, worried that some of the elder entrants might correlate self-worth and appearance.
“With 4- to 6-year-olds, there’s some danger of them beginning to feel that they are being loved only for their physical attractiveness rather than for their full repertoire of human skills and emotions,” said Pruett, a clinical professor of child psychiatry and nursing at the Yale School of Medicine. “Because that’s not going to make friends or teach you how to cope with frustration or master the world.”
Ricki Reyes, one of Saturday’s three judges and the father of a finalist in last year’s national competition, said that even for the most competitive families, children needn’t feel pressured to be beautiful.
“There is some truth in it, I guess, but it all depends on the parents and how they handle it,” he said in a telephone interview from his Bradenton home. Then he placed his hand over the receiver and noted to his wife, Lucille, that their son, Ricki, was combing his hair again.
“I’m very positive about competition and my kids see that. It’s all about the kids having fun,” he said. “I’ve seen families get closer or have more fun doing this than going to Busch Gardens for a week.”
Pruett agreed that as an “avocation or a weekend activity,” pageantry could cause little harm. But he and others noted that, especially for children who are too young to be cognizant of the competition, pageants reveal that some parents want their children to be “extensions of themselves,” as Martin Drell, the director of the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, put it.
Lici DeVitre has already competed in five such pageants. She is 15 months old. Her mother, Debbie, a former beauty pageant competitor who dressed to the nines herself, used pauses between categories to strip Lici, douse her in hairspray (“It keeps her dry”) and groom her in the crib she brought from home.
“Excuse me!” she demanded indignantly during one such routine, as she collided with an absent-minded spectator.
“I do have some concerns about how the children are being thought about here as entities,” Pruett said. “You could replace an 18-month-old with a life-size doll and what you’re really measuring is the parents’ dressing sense in making their children look beautiful. It’s an exercise of futility and narcissism on the part of the parents.”
“I think people have a sense that there is an exploitation of children lurking beneath the surface of our culture,” he continued. “We use them to sell and advertise things. The worst case scenario is the sexualization of children. Some people think that the beauty pageant is the more innocent end of that continuum, but it is a continuum.”
Two other child psychiatrists characterized the parents as “narcissistic.” But Nicole Johnson, Miranda’s mother, took umbrage with the description.
“She’s like any other average child,” said Johnson. “She goes out and plays in the mud, and I think she looks cute whether she’s in the mud or in a dress. She does beauty pageants because she likes them and not because she’s made to do them.”
“I teach Miranda that it’s more important who she is and that she’s not judged by her beauty,” Johnson said just before retrieving Miranda’s score sheet, which ranked her face, hair and eyes on a scale of one to 10.
Judy Linger, a child psychiatrist, fretted that when parents overvalue any particular attribute -- such as beauty, sporting ability or musical virtuosity -- they slow the child’s social development.
“We get what I call ‘Her Majesty the Baby syndrome,’” said Linger, the medical director of the child program at the Center for Emotional and Behavioral Health in Vero Beach, Fla. “It’s a sense of inflated importance in the world. In these cases, it continues until the age of 6 because they have messages sent to them saying that they are indeed the center of the universe. So when they get to be 5 or 6 years old and should be growing out of that sense, they’re not, in essence, because they’re spoiled rotten.”
None of that mattered to Miranda or her extended family when the emcee crowned her St. Petersburg’s most beautiful baby girl. No longer festooned with the bows and barrettes of her formalwear, she looked like any other 5-year-old with a fussy family.
Feeling emboldened by her victory and all the attention, she started issuing demands.
“I want some more ice cream!”
Her brother, guiding her by the hand to The Pier’s food court, obliged, grinning.
