Children are Children. Let Them Be
By Margery McCurdy Plummer

I’ve thought of writing this column half a dozen times but decided not to because it was too troubling to think about. Maybe the subject needs to be addressed, though.

I was aimlessly going through the TV channels recently, thinking of going to my most watched channel 52 (the Weather Channel) when I came upon something almost exactly like I had seen several years ago.

The event shown was a beauty pageant with little girls parading across a stage. These weren’t average looking little girls one would expect to see wearing frilly looking dresses, bows in their hair, and wearing patent leather slippers and lace trimmed anklets.

What I was seeing again were four, five and six year old child women dressed in seductive adult apparel, full adult make up, grown up hair styles, and sparkling jewelry. As they walked across the stage, mothers in the audience coached their facial expressions and flirtatious smiles. A winner was chosen and congratulated, and losers were consoled as they cried. One mother could be heard saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll move on to the next one.”

The face of a smiling man appeared on the screen, “Kiddie Queen Countdown” flashed on, then “The End.” I’d never seen anything so bizarre, but then I remembered that I had. I don’t know what the name of that pageant was. I had just seen clips of it, and it was almost identical to this “Kiddie Queen Countdown.” The subject was the most beautiful child that I had ever seen. Her name, you may remember was Jon Benet, and she had disappeared, only to be found brutally murdered in the basement of their home.

My thought at seeing this child dressed in this manner was that something was terribly wrong, and I couldn’t imagine the mentality of parents who would exploit a very young child in this way.

At that time, it was very difficult to protect children from the sick pedophiles all around the country who prey on little children, male and female. Now it is next to impossible. With the internet and computer conversations, children can be lured into the dangerous territory from which many never return. We see pictures of missing children very often on television or in the newspaper.

Our children were boys, so there was no mention of beauty pageants. However my mother and father had daughters, and I can remember my mother taking pictures of me for some sort of contest. I never knew what happened to the picture, but I now have a pretty bronze medal with a child’s picture (not me) on the front and “Sears International Baby Contest... Honorable Mention.” I was five years old, and there was no identifying name on the medal. This was not an “in person” contest.

A picture I have from a newspaper that I treasure is one of my sister and me sitting in Honey Run Creek with the water rippling around our ankles. We were two curly haired sisters of about two and four years of age. No names are given but a caption beneath reads “Happy Childhood.” Would that everyone’s childhood could be that happy and that there will never be a “Kiddie Queen Countdown” contest or anything like it to ruin the childhood of so many children.