Child beauty pageants are the epiphany of over-parenting, which most of us would gasp upon. And yet, children are being projected online, by their parents-but under the pretence of love, acceptance and adoration. What happens when they no longer meet the mark?
Over-parenting, an easy mistake many of us could make whilst bringing up our children. Living in the 21st century puts pressure on us all, and that includes our children. Take school for instance, we attend school and by the time we are 10 years of age-the comparison between you and a school friend is hard to ignore.
Who Are You In Relation to Them?
When we are growing up and learning, it is a rational and some might say-a vital part of growing up. We experience ourselves in relation to others and recognise ourselves in others. Where this is an enjoyable experience, it can also be daunting and threatening. It is called social comparison theory, which can either motivate or de-motivate. It can either make you up your game, or chastise yourself for not doing better.
‘Struth’, the complexities of being’
The problem with making comparisons in adolescence is that the rational brain has not yet developed, and therefore it is difficult to make balanced judgements. This is not necessarily in relation to only yourself, but also in relation to others. Living in today’s society only confounds this further when the brain is continually bombarded with ‘other people’ and their supposed perfections, via social media.
And It Doesn’t Stop at Adolescence
We may benefit from the experience and wisdom of age-but it certainly does not vanquish doubt or insecurity. Social comparison is a natural process when we are getting to know someone, and a safeguard, as well as an education. We have to be able to trust the person before us, and so we must understand first who they are. Normally, we do this from our own experience, and therefore we look for our own selves in another.
Although all we may see is:
‘what we would like to be’ instead.
With all this self-comparison surrounding us, is it any wonder we turn to our children and prepare them for this upcoming onslaught. The pre-millenial generation did not grow up with computers or social media, they have discovered this in their adulthood. Where this has always been a fact of life, it is now more physical than ever in the daily feeds that are hard to get away from.
Neuroticism In The Pre-Millennial Generation
This, perhaps for the pre-millennial generation is more alarming. Certainly, it is the pre-millennials who have taken up Facebook as a daily habit. Where millennials seem to have deserted it and moved over to Instagram, the pre-millennials are using it as a child parade-I have never seen so many pictures of people’s children. It is the new accepted form of kid pageants…
“you know those hideous American spectacles; where parents dress their children up asbeauty queens”.
We are literally surrounded by affirmations left, right and centre from friend and foe. And most of these affirmations are now in relation to their children, since pre-millennials are now the ones taking up the news feed…with their children.
Research has in fact found-those sensitive to the social media of others, and active participants in the demoralising aspect of social comparison, exhibit neurotic behaviour. They found neurotic behaviour, was a precursor in motivating a tendency towards over-emphasising one’s profile and status on Facebook. A type of narcissism, because it is motivated by the need to be above others, rather than to be accepted by them.
Facebook practically breeds the neurotic mother.
So, my thinking is: have pre-millennials birthed their own narcissism in the idealisation of their children on Facebook? And what an outlet Facebook is.
What Does This Do To Children?
As someone who has spent a lot of time with children, I can tell you: the over-parenting, or the over-expectations of children, will-in the end, either turn them into fellow narcissists, or make them run the other direction. It is emotional abuse in its true from, but often goes overlooked and undiscovered. A lot of children are suffering from this these days, because in one instance-the world is tough and competitive, and in another-they are not receiving the kind of attention they need.
Instead of love being the foundation of a child’s upbringing-money, status and power become the preferred threshold.
And yet, mothers parading their children at child beauty pageants may only be admired by onlookers.
‘How they must love their girls!’
One of the mother’s of a child pageant contestant remarked:
“I’m a perfectionist-I have to get it right”
(in conversation with Sky News)
This behaviour, although extreme-shows a mother living her life through her child. All the regrets and dashed dreams, can be re-born again.
The over-personification of children is introducing the world of adulthood at far too quick an age. Where many proud parents will be happily sharing a big part of their lives online, these are often images and descriptions, which only seek to idealise their child over another.
‘Kayla came first in gymnastics…we are so proud’ And so follows perfect ballerina esque photo after photo. Where ‘Kayla’ may adore gymnastics, and respectfully her parents ought to be proud-why does there seem to be a price tag attached to it? Aren’t parents always ‘proud’ of their children? And why are we being bombarded with so many adolescent children-still in single digits?
Young girls love to dress up, I did too-still do, but my mother didn’t put me on display or idealise my status within a group. I wasn’t pampered as a child and I wasn’t the princess. I largely grew up unassuming and approached those topics in adulthood, rather than childhood, because that is where it is meant to be explored.
It means, even though I have an idea of who I am, it has been birthed from my own self-discovery and not via someone else. Think mothers and daughters in tow at the supermarket-in matching outfits, and Kayla is only aged 4. When you decide a child’s destiny-you are suppressing a child’s development.
What happens when little Tilly doesn’t grow up to be the apple of her mother’s eye?
She becomes ostracised. Emotional abuse at the ‘heart’ of the perfect family.
I don’t think that most Muslims hate ordinary Americans who believe in the general principle of “live and let live.” Moreover I don’t think that most Americans would unhesitatingly embrace Israeli Nazism if they had the chance to know the truth about Israel e.g. that it is a criminal state par excellence based on ethnic cleansing land theft and racist and religious discrimination.
Unfortunately most Americans are spoon-fed Jewish propaganda from early childhood. This creates a virtual reality in America’s collective mind about Israel a virtual reality that is nearly completely disconnected from the real reality in Israel-Palestine.
For example many Americans are made to think that Israel and America have much in common in terms of democracy. However the truth is that democracy in Israel is more or less confined to Jews while non-Jews are systematically discriminated against. Their land is confiscated their homes are demolished and their rights and dignity are trampled upon.
And when they seek redress at Jewish courts they discover that non-Jews can’t possibly hope for true justice and equality under Jewish rule. Ask non-Jewish Americans who have been living in Israel and you will hear a lot of hair-raising stories about the Israeli “democracy.”
Some Americans are so brainwashed that they are willing to claim that Muslims hate America for its freedoms. This is what Georg W. Bush probably the most ignorant President America has ever had once claimed.
The truth of the matter however is that most Muslims hate the US government for embracing tyrannical Arab and Muslim regimes that torment their own people by denying them natural freedoms and civil liberties as well as the right to freely elect their own governments. This is in addition of course to backing and supporting Israel’s Nazi-like policies including ethnic cleansing and settlement expansion at the expense of the native Palestinians.
It is really scandalous that while Americans boasts bout their First Amendment freedoms successive American governments have consistently embraced despotic regimes abroad. In many instances the US intervened either brazenly or behind the scenes to destabilize or overthrow democratically elected governments such as in Iran Chile and the occupied Palestinian territory.
Of courser America’s days of infamy are too numerous to be counted. For example we all tend to view Adolph Hitler as the ultimate embodiment of evil. However it is historically true that the US its allies Stalin Mao murdered more people than the Third Reich ever did.
America wanted to be looked upon as a moral example to be followed. But the beacon of light eventually turned into a ruthless beastly power where military might took priority over moral power.
Take for example America’s stand over Israel. For decades the United States enabled Israel to violate every international law and norm and commit every conceivable crime under the sun including murdering children by raining on them White phosphorus.
This is the same America that allows herself to judge the world for human rights violations while enabling Israel diplomatically politically and mainly militarily to pursue decidedly Nazi-like policies against the Peoples of the Middle East.
Watch the ongoing genocidal onslaught which against our helpless and unprotected people in the Gaza Strip. Some of you might be prompted to think that I am indulging in excessive exaggeration when I speak of a genocidal onslaught.
But I am not. Otherwise, how else can we describe a condition where hundreds of ultra-advanced war planes rain missiles and laser-guided bombs from high altitudes on apartment buildings, homes, and civilian neighborhoods packed with men, women and children? Yet, this is exactly what Israel has done¸ murdering , maiming and incinerating thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians and utterly destroying tens of thousands of buildings.
Israel effectively destroyed Gaza, murdering and maiming untold numbers of civilians. Gaza, more or less, became the Dresden of Palestine. And the whole world looked on rather passively as if the killing-field and the shockingly pornographic destruction of life and property were occurring on a distant galaxy. we are not really talking about war, even an asymmetrical war. We are actually talking about a real massacre, a massacre that is reminiscent of the time when the Nazis ganged up on European Jewry 70 years ago.
The macabre scenes of decapitated and badly-mutilated children were too shocking to be described in words. Reporters at the site of the carnage lost their composure and collapsed as they couldn’t cope with the gruesomeness of the pornographic bloodbath.
In 2006, the Nazi government of Israel dropped 2-3 million cluster bomblets over Lebanon enough to kill or maim 2-3 million Lebanese children. And instead of denouncing the manifestly nefarious act the US government declared that “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
Today there is an anti-Islamic hysteria in the United States. The main reason for this hysteria is the fact that the United States can’t live normally with itself without an external enemy. In short there has to be an enemy in order to keep the American psyche intact. There has to be an enemy in order to keep the military industrial complex functioning. In short capitalism can’t function without war.
In fact Muslims don’t view themselves as enemies of the United States as the vast bulk of Muslims are peaceable people who are mainly interested in the pursuance of their daily life enhancing their daily living improving their standard of living and making ends meet.
Yes there are violent groups here and there but these are tiny groups which in no way represent the Muslims of the world.
I think many Americans are ignorant of these facts. I also think that many other Americans would condemn Muslims right or wrong. I am talking about people who would burn the Muslim Holy scripture the Quran in order to highlight their hatred of Islam a religion with more than 1.6 billion people.
Well to those I say one thing: the dogs will keep barking and the caravan will keep going.
Besides if you have one reason to hate us we have a thousand reasons to hate you.
None the less unlike you we are not willing to allow our primitive impulses to decide our behaviors. Our religion the source of our morality and behavior doesn’t allow us to behave the way they do.
This is why we will not burn copies of the New Testament we will not attack churches and we will not call Christianity bad names.
It is often claimed that the religion Jesus founded is based on Love. But any fleeting view of your “religion” caricatures a hate-based cult that has very little to do with Jesus and the authentic messages he preached.
Did Jesus ever call children “murderers” as you did recently in Texas? In fact I dare say that you and people who subscribe to your cultist hatefulness are a cancer upon the conscience of Christ.
So you hate us because of the 9/11 events. Well 99% of Muslims condemned in the strongest terms these terrorist acts. And we are sorry for the umpteenth time for the death of dozens of hundreds of innocent Americans including Muslims in these terrorist attacks.
None the less your democratic elected government has been responsible for the death of millions of Muslims. In Iraq alone the United States has killed or caused the death of at least two million Muslims in the past two decades. Hundreds of thousands of other Muslims have been killed in Afghanistan. These are just two examples of America’s genocidal wars against the Muslim world.
Hence if you have the right to cite one 9/11 we can cite hundreds and thousands of 9/11s. And don’t you ever think that your lives are worth more than our lives. All human beings were created by the same God and are equal if only because there is no such a thing as a lesser God.
One day the oppressed will have their day and there will be no spin no hasbara and no propaganda. And the New York Times and Fox News and AIPAC and all other organs of lie will have been evaporated into nonexistence.
God is just.
Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine
I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.
These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.
But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.
Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.
What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?
The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.
In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.
The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.
However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.
In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.
Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.
For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.
Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!
Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.
To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.
Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.
I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.
A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?
Words can kill; words do kill.
Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.
Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine
In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.
The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.
The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.
Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.
The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.
Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.
I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.
(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.
