Toddlers and children beauty pageants – Risk factors for severe psychological turmoils

Photo source: The Bronte Soul

Make-up, hair extensions, teased hairstyles, clouds of hairspray, flippers (fake teeth), sophisticated costumes, screaming crowds (mostly mothers), weird postures, twitched face expressions, tiaras, trophies, money and more or less talent are the ingredients for the usual children beauty pageants, along with exercised smiles and hysterical crying and outbursts.

The children that compete in these beauty contests are aged 2/3 to 10 (sometimes even younger than 2 years old) and usually have one only goal: get the money and get the tiara (tiara and/or trophy and/or ribbon). Of course, these little beauties do not enter the contests at their own request, but their mothers are the ones to fill in the applications on time, pay the participation fee, create or buy the outfit, establish the type of performance for the „talent” section (usually some song about the greatest love in one’s life and/or a terrible heartbreak; dancing is also a very popular talent to be displayed), create and exercise the hairstyle and make-up, keep a strict rehearsal schedule, hire trainers if the mom herself cannot coach the whole thing, fill in the gas tank and travel hundreds of miles with their children just to spend a weekend on an emotional roller coaster that for most of the mother-daughter teams has its last stop on „low”. So why do these mothers (and rarely fathers) put their young girls (and sometimes boys) through this experience? Well, the official answers are „For them to have fun and experience dress-up in a more complex environment.”, „Because she likes it.”, „Because she is beautiful.” Etc. Off the record answers include the „For the money” and „Because she (read „I”) has to be number one” versions. Anyway, for myself, the most feared answer to that question would be „Because I used to participate in such contests myself”, and no matter how that sentenced ends („… and I always won”, „…and I’ve never won, but I know she can do it!”), I just know things are going downhill.

What can a child learn by being a professional/serial beauty pageant contestant? Well, encouraging the sense of competition is okay, having a hobby to be dedicated to is okay, spending time with mom is great, but when you become a winning machine, a 1st place chaser or a tiara collector, serios psychological problems are just around the corner. These contests promote pshysical beauty as a main value, complimented of course by the „special talent” and „warm hearts”. A child, especially a female that is going to pay so much attention to her looks and that knows she is being assesed for it, is very proned to develop eating disorders, such as anorexia or bulimia. Also, paranoid features can occur as a response to the „no other girl is your friend here” speech, regarding the relationships between the participants (both mothers and daughters), usually all smiles and hugs at the surface but opposition can be sensed at a deeper level. And this brings another problem to my mind, dissimulation as a form of interraction, which can be used outside contests too and become a habit. Also, seeing screaming crowds, rivers of tears at all times and having to put on an act and playing a role could lead to learning hysteric behaviors. Anxiety is no stranger for these girls either. If at first sight they seem to learn how to be prepared for stressful situation, think of this: what if the girl does not really want to participate and does this only to please her mother? What if she can’t actually dance or sing, but she has to do that anyway? And what if she feels embarrassed? What if she would rather like to spend time with friends in her home town and not in some cheap hotel miles away from her house? Then I believe yes, anxiety and frustration are near these children at all times. These and many other psychological problems can emerge from having to be something that you are not at a very early age. And inner problems are not the only ones. Displaying such a mature look (these girls are five or six years old, yet their faces look like those of at least 16 years old) may attract unwanted public, such as pedophiles. Paying the fee for your child’s picture to be posted on a website with heavy traffic is again, in my opinion, not the best choice to be made. Unfortunately, there have been cases of young pageant participants that have been victims in murder cases, so things are not as simple as one might think.

Mothers of these children are usually trying to live their own dreams through their young daughters. I am talking about dreams that they either could not accomplish or accomplished in such way that they’ve become a way of life. Playing dress-up with your daughter can be great, but why transform it into a full-time job? I also need to mention that these contests usually take place on weekends, so the children that also go to school have no free time to invest into building healthy relationships, behaviors, attitudes or follow their own dreams.

So many things can be discussed about children beauty pageants, ranging from ethics, parenthood, mental health, development, competition or interpersonal relationships, but I will end the article like this: See your children and invest in their potential, but give them the oportunity to make their own choices and fulfill their own dreams.

Article by Lucia Grosaru

Want to make the right decision? Just wear six hats!

Photo © Paula E. Maloney

Don’t worry, you won’t have to wear all six of them at once! Relax now, making the right decision won’t put you in the “faux pas” section of fashion.

I want to present a method that will help you look at a decision from different perspectives, so that in the end you will have a complete image of what you’re dealing with.

The method belongs to Edward de Bono, known as the promoter of lateral thinking (structured creativity) and it’s called Six Thinking Hats.

What are these hats he’s talking about? They are nothing more than metaphors for different types of thinking strategies. So, instead of asking yourself “What would a scientist do if he were in my position?”, just wear the White Hat. Oh, you don’t know what the White Hat does, right. Here is a list with the “magic powers” of each hat.

White Hat: Centres decision on facts, available data and objectivity. Also means analyzing past trends.

Red Hat: Based on intuition, emotions and feelings. Focus on what you feel without trying to provide an explanation.

Black Hat: Look at things from a pessimistic, cautious and defensive perspective.

Yellow Hat: See what the benefits of your future decision are or evaluate what you’ve already achieved. Positive thinking.

Green Hat: Creativity, considering options, challenges and change.

Blue Hat: Control the process of thinking and don’t focus on the subject itself (Metacognition).

The method can be used for individual or group decision making situations.

So, without becoming Harry Potter with the Sorting Hat on, if you were to choose just one hat out of these six, which one do you think it best suits your way of thinking?

Article by Lucia Grosaru

Counting is Not Innate

Photo © DryIcons

Over centuries of existence, man felt the need of keeping records. In order to do so, notches on sticks or stones have been used at first, and later, from about 3000BC, they’ve been replaced by symbols called numbers .

Counting systems

The Egyptians, since about 3000 BC, used a vertical line to represent the number 1, and 10 was shown by ^. The Egyptian system has been adopted by Rome and it is still in occasional use. (Example: Egyptian 23 is |||^^ , because they were writing from right to left ; Roman 23 is XXIII).

Later, from about 1600 BC, Egyptian priests simplified the counting system by giving a name and also a symbol to every multiple of 10, 100, 1000 etc. This is how time and space have been saved in the process of writing. The system is later adopted in other writing systems, such as Greek, Hebrew and early Arabic.

The Babylonian numbers (1750 BC), with 60 as the base, survived until these days in telling time ( 60 seconds and 60 minutes), the 180 degrees of a triangle and the 360 degrees of a circle. They’ve also been the first to introduce the concept of place-value, which means that a number will have a different meaning depending on its place in a numeric sequence. (Example : In the number 111, 1 has three different meanings :1 , 10 and 100.)

In Babylonian and Mayan counting systems, the number zero was only partly effective. For “zero” to receive its full meaning, different symbols were needed for every number up to the base figure. The Indians were the first to achieve this, and the digits that we now use made their appearance gradually, since the 3rd Century BC (fact shown by the inscriptions of Asoka). People in India used a dot or a small circle to show that a place of a number has no value. By about AD 800, the Arabs gave the dot or small circle an arabic name, “sifr”.

Two centuries later, Indian digits reach Europe (in Arabic manuscripts) and since then they are known as Arabic numerals. Also, “sifr” is transformed into the European “zero”. Several centuries must pass until the Arabic numerals gradually replaced the system inherited from the Roman Empire (from the 3rd Century BC). I should also mention a previous form of “zero”, not symbolized in writing, used in the 1st millenium BC, due to the most basic counting machine, the abacus.

Nowadays, the most common counting system is the decimal system, with 9 digits and 0.

*Since the 20th Century, the binary language of computers has been also introduced as an international language. The binary language only uses zero and one. Read more here.

Amazonian tribe that has no word to express “one” or other numbers

“Massachusetts Institute of Technology” research team discovered an Amazonian tribe with only 300 speakers that use a language with no words to express any specific number.

“The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as “some” and “more,” but not precise numbers. “It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition” , said Gibson, “but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it’s not useful in their culture, so they’ve never picked it up.”

Extract from “MIT-led team finds language without numbers”. Read whole article here.

Article by Lucia Grosaru

Age and Internet Browsing

Photo © Petr Kratochvil

Your interest in reading this article was probably aroused by the words „Internet browsing” and you’re wondering what could be so special about this activity, so common among people these days?

Well let’s stop and think of this for a moment: when was the last time you saw your grandmother “google” for the latest knitting patterns?. Probably never, right? This is a reality, especially among Romanian elders. When it comes to being physically close of “one of those things”, most of them don’t even have the courage to wipe the dust off a computer.

Now, what about middle-aged people? Yes, most of them already use computers quite well…at work. At home on the other hand, this activity is most likely to be seen as a waste of time.

Starting with these premises, American scientists have conducted a study that demonstrated that Internet searching is not a time wasting activity, but on the contrary, it can stimulate and even improve brain activity in this age segment.

This study has concluded that even though brain activity during reading, for example, is significant, it only stimulates language control, memory, reading and visual abilities. Still, Internet searching comes in addition and improves decision making and complex reasoning. More, this kind of activity triggers a greater extent of neural circuitry than reading does.

In this case, we ask ourselves why do middle-aged people and elders avoid using a computer? Well, American scientists have asked themselves the same question and their study showed that older adults are primarily concerned with how memory issues may impact their performance. Another obstacle would be the decrease in sensory keenness that affects this age segment, but it can be easily over-passed by some simple handlings, like enlarging the font.

So, these people only need support from younger adults in order to learn how to use a computer. This is why, instead of a conclusion, I invite you all to offer some private lessons of Internet browsing and computer usage to the elders in your family.

Article by Affiliated Author Adina Preda

Time to be Single

Photo © Razvan Tulai

Psychologist Bella DePaulo approached the matter of living single from a global perspective, coming to the conclusions that people tend to spend more years living single, the age at which they’re getting married is rappidly increasing, and the divorce rate is getting higher by the years.

Studying the life of american singles and not only, DePaulo depicted the contemporary world as the one in which adults choose to live a single life for a longer period that their predecessors. Regarding the american population, she pointed out that the median age at which people first marry (if they choose to marry at all) is nearly 26 for women and 27.5 for men. In the late 1950’s, the median age for getting married was 20 for women and 22.5 for men.

According to DePaulo’s research, some of the countries in which the age at which people first marry has increased by more than 4 years from the 1970s to the 1990s are Australia, Belgium, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States.

The psychologist is also talking about the divorce rate that’s increasing, turnind this process into an ordinary one. She also mentions the “serial marriers”, that try over and over again to stay married and the ones that will remain single for life.

“It is a world-historic time to be single, and we’re living it!” – Bella DePaulo

Article by Lucia Grosaru