I've raised four of them but I've not worked with kids except a short stint teaching Life Skills and I have to be honest. I'm still recovering (don't teach Year 8 or 9 as a visiting teacher)! I was disturbed to read about the Northcote Beauty Pageant and the fascination many children had, not just for the pageant, but for their North American six year old "idol", Eden Wood. Eden and her mother were to be the guests of honour and Eden was scheduled to perform there. Much to the distress of all those parents and children who rocked up to idolise her, her mother cancelled Eden's appearance two days in a row because she "feared for her daughter's safety". Some people had made it clear they would protest. Another child star on Australia's "You've Got Talent" allegedly received hate mail. May I say, and I accept I am not being at all subtle about this, if Eden's mother really did fear for her daughter's safety, she would not be robbing her daughter of her childhood by dressing her up stripper style, dolling her up with rouge and false eye lashes and coaching her to sing those innuendo-ed songs whilst slapping her bottom. Except that she really has a very ordinary voice she could have been a child substitute for Christina Aguilera or Cher (when she gets to teenage hood) in the movie "Burlesque". The child star was asked by a journalist how she felt about being in Australia. Eden replied that being here "was fun". Why? Because she "got to see the koalas and the kangaroos". Can I remind her and her mother that she could have done that without the lip gloss and the sequins unless of course her mother could not have afforded to travel here without being on the sexploitational gravy train? Anyone who's done any work in detection deception would not have seen any evidence of fun in the girl's eyes and face as she said what she said. She looked strained and as if she were saying what she'd been told to say by an exploitative mother. But context is everything. It's not just her mother enabling little Eden. The Darebin Council willing to host the pageant enabled such abuse of childhood innocence. The Aussie parents who travelled there from interstate or country Victoria encouraging their own children to worship Eden and queue for their 15 seconds of fame and a photo opportunity are duplicitous. And so were rival television stations, trying to out-gazump each other with the rights to our commoditised and objectified international guest; persuading her to have a photo with two young children who turned out to be the offspring of a Channel Nine journalist; plants from "A Current Affair". This was deceptive and desperate too. Indeed the lengths the stations were prepared to go to get the scoop showed a callous disregard for the paying audience; a symbolic metaphor for the callous disregard stage parents can show for the welfare of their young children. The media will say they were simply covering a story and allowing us to make up our own minds. Some parents have tried to rationalise this by saying children of all generations have played dress-ups. Parents have asked why this is so different to those pushy parents of soccer kids who ensure there are 4 training sessions a week or swimming kids who get taken to the pool to practise 6 mornings a week at 5am. That's a fair point if the parents are trying to push their kids beyond what the kids want for themselves for the sake of the parents' own fortunes, prestige or unmet needs. However our champion Olympic gold medallist, Catherine (Cathy) Freeman wrote a note she posted on her wall at eight years of age. It read: "I will be the best athlete in the world." Clearly this is what Cathy wanted for herself and few would argue that a career in athletics was going to cause the same harm as a fixation on body image, sequins and sex to sell a six year old. The greatest sadness to me is that if attention was what feeds Eden and her mother, then that's what they got. And so the Hollywood gravy train rolls on as the innocence of our children gets run over.
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