I worked as a 20 year old doing tech work at my college theater. we did lot of beauty pageants. The crew was very vulgar in the way we talked about the parents and kids that were involved. this was 30 years ago but I found that everyone involved were treating theses 16-18 years old kids as if they were a commodity. this included the judges and sponsors of the pageants. don’t have kids but would discourage any daughter or friends daughter in being involved with them because of how slimy I found those who sought out being involved with them were.
One of my classmates in college won the Miss New Jersey pageant in 1977.
She resigned her crown before the Miss America pageant because she was getting all these phone calls from creepy older men offering her about $1,000/night (in today’s dollars) for her services.