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.
When Gaza’s ceasefire was announced, it was presented as more than a triumph. As a result, it was supposed to usher in a new phase of peace, prosperity, and stability. However, nothing like that happened. The Board of Peace and the International Stabilization Force remained unmaterialized ideas. Even months later, those promises look thin on the ground.
A Ceasefire That Still Leaves People Dead
What about a ceasefire that remains unable to stop brutality and killings? A ceasefire means safer movement, sufficient aid, and complete elimination of fear. Unfortunately, the people of Gaza haven’t seen that even after the announcement of a so-called “20-point plan” and the “ceasefire”.
Recently, Israeli strikes killed three Palestinians on June 11 while Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey were trying to advance the fragile truce. Days earlier, another Israeli airstrike on a large tent encampment in Gaza City killed at least seven innocent Palestinians, including two women, and injured 15 others, some of them children.
Moreover, more than 950 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire began. These numbers show why the word “ceasefire” sounds hollow to many families. A truce that cannot stop repeated deaths is not functioning as protection.
The Force That Has Not Protected Gaza
The International Stabilization Force was supposed to be a central part of Gaza’s next phase. The ceasefire plan, later tied to a UN mandate, imagined an international force that could support security, help stabilize the territory, assist transitional arrangements, and give the ceasefire practical weight.
Unfortunately, the force has not become a meaningful presence yet.
Numerous credible reports state that plans for the Gaza International Stabilization Force were in question because troop pledges had stalled. Countries expected to contribute had not made the commitments needed to turn a political idea into an operational force.
This delay matters a lot as Gaza now needs a mechanism that can protect displacement sites, secure aid routes, support safe movement, and help prevent violations. Without that, the stabilization force becomes another promise Palestinians hear about but do not feel.
Why Governments Are Hesitating
The hesitation is partly political and partly practical. Sending troops into Gaza would mean entering one of the most obliterated and contested places in the world. Foreign soldiers could be caught between Israel, armed factions, displaced civilians, and a population deeply suspicious of outside arrangements.
There are also unresolved questions about the mandate. Would the force protect civilians from all attacks, or mainly focus on disarmament? Would it monitor Israeli actions as well as Palestinian armed groups? Would Palestinians have a real voice in how it operates?
A force without legitimacy could fail quickly. But delay also has a huge cost. While governments hesitate, civilians live without a credible protection system against the genocidal acts of Israel.
Monitoring Without Enforcement
The United States was expected to close its Civil-Military Coordination Centre near Gaza as the broader Gaza plan stalled. The Centre was designed to monitor the ceasefire and help improve aid flows. This is because most people observed that it failed to deliver meaningful results.
That failure exposes the problem with symbolic mechanisms. A coordination Centre can collect information, but it cannot protect civilians unless it has authority, access, and consequences behind it. Monitoring may record violations only, but it cannot stop them adequately.
Aid Crossings Reveal the Truth
Humanitarian access is the clearest test of the ceasefire. If food, medicine, fuel, water, and shelter materials cannot enter Gaza reliably, then the truce is failing at the most basic level.
OCHA reported on June 5 that Israel had kept Zikim Crossing in northern Gaza closed for two weeks. Aid convoys were being rerouted to Kerem Shalom, as the last remaining cargo crossing. That rerouting created congestion and slowed the collection of critical supplies.
In genocide-affected Gaza, a delayed truck can mean empty kitchens, untreated wounds, missing medicine, and another night in unsafe shelter. UN Secretary-General António Guterres also urged Israel to reopen closed crossings so aid could move rapidly, safely and at scale.
How can a ceasefire that leaves aid trapped at crossings restore civilian life?
The Deadlock Behind the Crisis
Talks on Gaza’s next phase remain stuck on the issue of Hamas disarmament and completeIsraeli military withdrawal. Palestinian factions had agreed to most points in the peace blueprint, but Israel is reluctant to keep its military in Palestine.
Israel is trying to hide their heinous plan of genocide advancement in the name of Hamas disarmament. While Hamas completely denies the allegations of Israel and links their efforts to a political process toward Palestinian statehood and an end to illegal occupation.
Gaza needs fewer promises and more enforceable guarantees from the international community now. Civilian shelters must be protected, aid crossings must remain open, medical evacuations must move quickly, and ceasefire violations must be reported quickly. Any stabilization force must have a clear civilian-protection mandate. Israeli withdrawal lines must be transparent, and reconstruction must be tied to Palestinian governance.
Above all, there must be consequences when civilians are killed after a ceasefire has supposedly begun.
Final Thought
Gaza’s crisis shows the danger of genocidal diplomacy without delivery. A ceasefire without enforcement is not peace. Monitoring without consequences cannot protect innocent civilians. Aid promises mean little when crossings remain highly restricted.
Palestinians were promised stability and peace. What they received is continued death, delayed protection, and a plan stronger on paper than in Gaza.
Cancer is undoubtedly a race against time. In Gaza, that race is being lost not only inside hospital rooms but at closed crossings and stalled evacuation lists. Innocent patients who need chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, or specialist scans are being left to wait in a genocidal system that no longer has the tools to treat them adequately.
Rather than asking for comfort, they are unfortunately asking for access to treatment that exists elsewhere but remains out of reach. For all of them, survival now depends on something painfully simple: permission to leave the genocidal trap.
More Than 16500 Patients Blocked From Treatment
Gaza’s Health Ministry has revealed that Israel is preventing more than 16,500 Palestinians who need urgent medical treatment abroad from leaving the besieged enclave. These figures include patients with cancer and other serious health conditions that cannot be treated properly inside Gaza.
It is a deliberate health crisis made by Israel that is not limited to a few exceptional cases. Thousands of people have referrals, diagnoses, or urgent needs, yet remain trapped between a collapsed health sector and a completely restricted evacuation process.
For cancer patients, a missed chemotherapy cycle can weaken the chance of recovery. Likewise, a delayed surgery can allow the heinous disease to spread, and a postponed scan can leave doctors unable to know whether treatment is working. In normal circumstances, cancer care depends on timing, but in Gaza, it has become another casualty.
Why Cancer Patients Are Especially Vulnerable
Since cancer treatment is not a single injection or one hospital visit, it is a long process of extensive care. Patients need laboratory tests, biopsies, CT or MRI scans, blood transfusions, pain medicine, infection control, and repeated follow-up.
So, if one part of this chain breaks, the whole treatment plan can fail abruptly. This is why these patients are facing a severe life danger. They are intentionally dragged towards death by Israel’s hostilities.
More specifically, the World Health Organization highlighted that around 18,500 patients still urgently need medical treatment that is not available in Gaza. Unfortunately, most of the hospitals in Gaza are completely obliterated by Israeli airstrikes. The hospitals that are left are overwhelmed by trauma injuries, amputations, burns, infections, childbirth, chronic illness, and emergency surgery.
Gaza Patients Are Becoming Public Appeals
This is the case of human survival, as the crisis is now forcing patients and families to make public appeals. For example, the case of Amal al-Yazji, a school director and novelist in Gaza, who needs urgent life-saving cancer surgery that she cannot access inside the Strip after chemotherapy stopped working.
Her case is a powerful reflection of what many patients are facing. Roads and transportation systems have also collapsed in Gaza. Resultantly, the chances of treatment inside Gaza have reached near zero.
Recently, the United States’ lawmakers also pressed the Trump administration to help facilitate medical evacuations for cancer patients from Gaza. Their June 11 official letter warned of cancer patients being severely trapped without appropriate treatment and urged a medical pathway to at least East Jerusalem or the West Bank.
Waiting Has Become a Life Threat
For many patients, hospitals in Egypt, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, or other countries are not a preference but only a possible route to survival. This is why medical evacuations should not be treated as a favour but a humanitarian necessity.
There are other patients as well in Gaza whose waiting could lead to death. Several patients are suffering from Tuberculosis, heart, and kidney diseases. It can mean a child becoming too weak for treatment, a family watching a loved one decline while knowing care exists somewhere beyond the border.
What Must Change
Gaza’s patients, especially cancer patients, need urgent and predictable medical evacuation routes. Crossings must function for all the people who want to study or treat themselves, not only for political announcements. Referral approvals must move quickly. Eventually, hospitals in other countries must be accessible to those who need specialist care.
Moreover, inside Gaza, cancer services need medicines, diagnostic equipment, fuel, electricity, surgical supplies, and protection for health workers. But all of this comes under the banner of “peace”, which is not permissible by Israel at any cost. Rebuilding specialist care might take time, but these critical cancer patients do not have that anymore.
They are desperately waiting for a way out because they want their life to be protected. In an environment where even aid and water are stopped from entering the Strip, allowing patients to leave the besieged area seems impossible.
However, the international community must stand against this insanity and cruelty. Innocent people are dying every single day while those in power are not even paying any attention to them. In a nutshell, it’s time to stand against one of the greatest genocides of the century.
Gaza’s heinous genocide is no longer confined to moments of direct attack. It is now visible in the complete breakdown of daily life itself. Families are still being butchered vehemently in places where they had sought shelter. To worsen these matters, shortages of fuel, engine oil, gas, and spare parts are crippling hospitals, bakeries, rescue vehicles, water systems, and ordinary transport.
A Tent Camp Hit in Gaza City
On June 6, despite the so-called “ceasefire,” an Israeli air attack hit a tent camp in Gaza City where displaced Palestinians were sheltering. Resultantly, at least seven peoplewere killed, while at least 15 others were injured, many of them treated in intensive care. Women and children were believed to be among the casualties. The strike hit a United Nations school compound that had become a shelter for displaced families.
These were displaced people already living with the consequences of bombardment, evacuation, and loss. A tent camp is meant to be a temporary refuge for families with nowhere else to go. When such a place is hit, it deepens the fear that no civilian space is beyond danger.
A Wedding Turned Into Mourning
Moreover, the Gaza City strike by Israel targeted a tent next to another tent where a wedding appeared to be taking place. Unfortunately, earlier the same day, a strike in Khan Younis killed a man who was scheduled to be married later that day. His cousin said the family had prepared for the wedding but was instead attending his funeral.
This detail shows how deeply the genocide has entered private life. A wedding in Gaza is not just a celebration but an attempt to preserve social life despite displacement, hunger, and fear. When a groom is killed on the day of his wedding, even brief moments of normality remain exposed to violence.
The Ceasefire Gap
The attacks came amid discussions over the Gaza ceasefire process. Specifically, Hamas was preparing for meetings in Egypt on the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, while several Israeli attacks across Gaza that day killed at least nine people. Gaza remains under Israeli military control, and the second phase of the agreement has been stalled for months.
For people, the real meaning of a ceasefire depends on whether people can sleep safely, gather without fear, reach hospitals, and rebuild some predictable rhythm of life. If strikes continue and basic services keep failing, the gap between imaginative political claims and reality remains painfully wide.
The Shortages Freezing Daily Life
Alongside these unprovoked attacks, Gaza is facing another severe pressure due to a shortage of gas, engine oil, and spare parts. Undoubtedly, these shortages are affecting emergency services, bakeries, water supplies, and hospitals. Items that may sound technical outside Gaza now decide whether a generator runs, a vehicle moves, bread is baked, and whether water can be pumped.
These shortages are damaging daily life in connected ways:
Hospitals need generators and spare parts to keep operating rooms functioning
Bakeries need power and maintenance materials to continue producing bread
Water systems need energy supplies, chemicals and parts to keep desalination and pumping services running.
Hospitals and Rescue Services Under Pressure
Hospitals have been among the most vulnerable since October 2023. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza warned of an imminent health disaster after extreme power failures affected surgical operating rooms. Moreover, all of its generators have stopped working while summer heat is expected to place more pressure on the remaining equipment.
This is not a minor operational issue as Gaza’s remaining hospitals are already treating genocidal injuries, malnutrition, infections and chronic illness in overcrowded conditions. If generators fail, surgical care, emergency treatment, refrigeration, lighting, and essential equipment are all affected. Gaza’s authorities have also warned that fire and rescue operations risk coming to a halt as vehicles break down due to shortages of spare parts, fuel and engine oil.
Bread, Water and Survival
Food and water systems are also largely affected. Bakeries depend on fuel, generators, and maintenance materials, while water systems need energy supplies, chemicals, and spare parts. UNICEF data showed that seawater desalinationoutput had fallen to about 16,000 cubic metres per day, compared with 20,000 in March, due to the restrictions on essential supplies. In a densely displaced population, any reduction in water production quickly becomes a public health concern.
This is why Gaza’s broken daily life must be understood as a connected genocidal crisis. The strike on a tent camp, the killing of a groom, the failure of hospital generators, the collapse of rescue vehicles and the shortage of water-production supplies are not separate stories. Together, they show how civilian life is being attacked directly and indirectly at the same time.
In a nutshell, until these conditions change, daily life in Gaza will remain trapped between immediate violence and the gradual destruction of everything needed to survive.
