Fed Up Fridays! An 8-Year-Old Gets Botox and "Virgin Waxes". Are we Headed in the Right Direction?

The list of things that bother me about kiddie beauty pageants is long and obvious. If you take a random  sampling of parents in the U.S. I'm sure you'd find the occasional mom who finds nothing wrong with five-year-olds wearing high-heeled shoes, or putting make-up on a toddler for a special occasion. There's no accounting for taste, and we've all made parenting decisions that would be seen as odd by others. But the alleged thrill of seeing your young daughter dolled up and strutting her stuff attracts all of those like-minded parents in one place, and naturally, they get competitive. So competitive, in fact, that some of them are driven to do things that make teasing a little girl's hair and spraying her with tan-in-a-bottle seem downright normal.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kerry Campbell, a British transplant to California who injects her eight-year-old daughter with Botox.

Eight. Years. Old.

This mother's goal is to make her daughter a superstar. And apparently, pre-pubescent wrinkles will get in the way of that.

We'll skip over the psychological deficiencies present for a mother's goal to be superstardom for her daughter, instead of, say, happiness. She also has her daughter get monthly "virgin waxes,", a controversial method some say prevents hair from growing later. This mother's obsession borders on physical abuse, but amazingly there are no laws against buying Botox online and injecting it into your eight-year-old's face, or subjecting a girl with normal peach fuzz to painful waxes ("Although the pain makes me cry, I feel like a cool grown-up when it's all over," says the daughter.)

When I read about the things done to girls and young women throughout history in the name of beauty, I like to think that we live in a more enlightened time. We don't bind children's feet so that they will grow into tiny hooves, more attractive to men in China hundreds of years ago. We don't make children wear tight corsets so that their rib cages will grow narrower, as many upper-class girls were forced to do in the United States in the 1900s. As repulsive as kids' beauty pageants are, I had assumed that they were just an extreme form of dress-up, but Kerry Campbell insists that many of the girls her daughter will compete against have had these beauty treatments, and that her daughter needs them if she has a chance at winning.

We have not come very far. In fact, I think we may be going backwards.