I love watching telly. I enjoy all ends of the TV spectrum from serious political debate to soap operas (although if truth be told I’m more likely to be found watching Emmerdale than Newsnight).

However, my main reason for watching telly is to relax, switch off and take my mind of the stresses of real life. Sometimes though, I find myself watching a programme that has the completely opposite effect on me and this was the case when watching the recent Channel 5 offering, Blinging Up Baby. At the end of this hour of car crash television my blood pressure was sky high, I was ranting like a mad woman and I wanted to find the main protagonists of the show and lock them in a room until they saw sense.

For those of you that didn’t see it, the programme was investigating an ever growing trend for parents (mainly mothers of course) to dress up, bling up and in my view, tart up their young children. And I was shocked and appalled at the attitude of the mothers who were shown.

There were three families documented, one who is obsessed with entering her daughters in American style pageants, one who admits that she treats her baby like a dressing up doll, and one who truly believes that spending a ludicrous amount of money on her daughters is the right way to bring them up.

Sophie-May Dixon, 22 from Essex, spends small fortunes on her two girls, Princess Bliss and Precious Bell. But that’s not really my main bone of contention here. It’s what she spends it on that worries me deeply. These girls, aged 4 and 1, have 40 dresses each, including designer items from Ralph Lauren and Dolce and Gabbana, and must have shoes from Converse and Uggs, often personalised and ‘blinged up’ with crystals. On top of that, she pays for them to have regular manicures, they wear heavy gold hoop earrings, the older girl Princess often wears long hairpieces and most worryingly she has had fake tans to emulate her mother.

However, my real problem with Sophie-May (and others like her), is that in her defence for such actions, she says that she just wants her children to look ‘nice’ and to stand out from the crowd. My worry is that looking like that they will certainly stand out from the crowd – but purely because the crowd won’t want to be friends with them. She also states that she doesn’t force any of these things onto the girls, but that they ask for them. Has she not heard of the word no?

Sophie-May seems to have absolutely no understanding of how these girls are going to grow up and what values they’ll have (or not have). They will grow up thinking that they can have as much as they want, regardless of price. They will think that looks are the most important thing and that looking ‘good’ is more important than being a good person. And as their mother doesn’t currently work for a living, they won’t understand the values of working hard to get rewards.

There has been a lot of commentary about the programme, and a lot of very bitchy comments about how these children look. But we all have different tastes in clothes and as long as they look like children I don’t care how they’re dressed. What I do care about however, is that when they are dressed in a far too adult way there is a sinister underlying message. Toddlers in heels, make up, large earrings and fake tans is abhorrent to me, regardless of whether they’re entering a pageant or are being dressed like that every day of their lives. And this, together with the provocative dancing some of these children are encouraged to perform in pageants, well it doesn’t bear thinking about. And for a parent to either not understand or not care why this is inappropriate and potentially dangerous, is beyond me.

These mothers, by sharing their selfish, shallow and superficial principals, are creating little girls who are going to go through life thinking that what you look like is more important than who you are. And in my view, that is bordering on child cruelty.

NOTE TO SELF: Let children be children.