Swan Brooner on Living Dolls

YouTube - Living Dolls (1 of 9)

I have just watched Living Dolls on Youtube. It's about Swam Brooner, a five-year-old little girl who competes in child beauty pageants. Sometimes I wonder whether she wants to do this because she often seems sad. Her smiles on-stage seem fake. Her mother is extremely pushy and critical, telling her daughter to look up, not sing too low, etc. At the end, Swan wins $2500 prizemoney but the family has spent more than $70,000, so really the whole exercise was not profitable. If the same effort were put into trying to get her into college I think that might have been more profitable. With $70,000 you can get into quite a few universities.

I have recently heard that Swan's mother died and she is living in Alaska now. She is 13 and no longer doing beauty pageants. Even though she won some beauty pageants, she lost as well, and it was really sad to see her face when she lost.

Some of the comments on Youtube were about the observation that although many of the children in these child beauty pageants were very pretty, many of the mothers of these children were obese and homely. This suggests the possibility that these mothers are trying to compensate for their failures by succeeding through their children. That is, the parents are using their children to live their own lives.