Rich Juzwiak recently judged a children's beauty pageant. At his personal blog Juzwiak expands on his experience:
I was going to have a problem with the "facial beauty" score. I'd come with my own agenda: To compensate for the world's cruelty as much as possible (giving overweight girls, for example, an advantage just for having the confidence to challenge the standard of beauty) and be as vigilant against overbearing parents as my position would allow (taking off points for children whose routines could not be performed if their parents weren't leading from the behind the judges' tables).
For some reason, I thought I'd pull this off no problem because there'd be a more vague set of qualifications, perhaps a general 1 to 10 to be rewarded per category or something. I did not expect to be faced first and foremost with the specific question of how pretty a child's face is. How pretty is any child's face? In a state of constant flux, the child's face might as well be a blur. And no matter how pretty it is, it will change in a year, six months, two months. How does one even start making that kind of a call?
The Dish 