Heidi Atlas
Professor David Tomkins
Writ 340: Advanced Writing for the Arts and Humanities
28 March 2024
Dance Moms: A Breeding Ground for Bullies
Dance Moms, the reality television show where stage moms project their dreams of stardom, youth, beauty, and excellence onto their pretty young daughters, had its cultural moments in the decade prior to our current moments in the 2020s, but still lives on in popularity, in video essays, tiktok clips, and Lifetime is airing a reunion special in the near future. I used to love watching the show as a young girl, covertly, because my mother said it was garbage and I wasn’t allowed to watch it, which made me want to watch it even more of course. Plus, all my friends were watching it, and I wanted to be able to talk to them about it, to not be left out of the conversation. My friends bullied me a little, in retrospect. I felt belittled by them, for being a dork, for being so small, for being younger, for being Asian maybe, but it was a confusing experience for me, because they were also nice to me most of the time, and they were my friends. I loved them. We swam together on a synchronized swimming team. And we had a coach who could be pretty tough. She would yell at us, make us cry sometimes, but we knew it was in pursuit of excellence, of making us better, but we were just little kids, and it was difficult to deal with that emotionally, to not take it personally, to not crumple and fall apart under the pressure of performance, of perfection. Is that too much to put onto a little girl? I thought so. I remember my coach once told me if I worked harder and cared I could be so good I could go to the Olympics. I told her that I didn’t care about the Olympics and I just wanted to be a kid. The girls on Dance Moms were not allowed to be kids, as soon as their mothers signed the contracts that gave them fame at the price of their precious childhoods. Many of the girls who have spoken about being on the show now say they barely remember any of it, some have repressed it, some have spoken openly about the mental health problems it caused, and some openly praise it for launching their careers. Each former little girl has a different relationship with the show, different trauma to perhaps be unpacked or confronted, different memories and emotions surrounding it.
Abby Lee Miller, the infamous Dance Moms dance teacher/coach, is a ridiculously bombastic caricature of every mean coach you could imagine. My old coach was a unicorn riding a rainbow compared to her. She is a huge bully. She ranked the children on her team every week on a pyramid, from bottom to top. She played favorites (Maddie Zielger, and when she left the show, Brynn Rumfallo). She punished little girls based on their mothers’ behaviors. She screamed at little girls, and then screamed at them more when they would cry. But it was all allegedly in the pursuit of excellence. She said she could make these little girls into stars. But how much of this behavior was true to Abby Lee Miller, and how much of it was hammed up for the production value? And weren’t the girls already stars just by being on reality television and gaining tons of social media clout? The diegetic world of the show seems to ignore this for a few seasons, and then only ties it in when it relates to cyberbullying and exclusion, or other drama.
Bullying makes for great entertainment — it feeds into the very American need to categorize people into winners and losers, it’s a very clear and cathartic demonstration of a power dynamic. The bully is strong, the victim is weak. Abby is strong, the little girls she teaches are weak. It’s a familiar dynamic, almost comforting because it becomes formulaic the more you watch the show. It’s expected, it’s usually emotionally affecting, and occasionally ends with a cathartic apology, but usually ends with a crazy mom blowing up at Abby, while Abby plays dumb or coy about why the mother is so upset, or even yells back, guns blazing, willing to lash out at the mom and her little daughter too. Which makes for great television — it’s riveting as it is disturbing — you can’t take your eyes away, like a terrible car accident. There’s something incredibly voyeuristic and intrusive about the whole thing, consuming the childhood trauma of these young girls for entertainment.
But it’s not entirely fair to put all of the blame of the toxicity of Dance Moms upon Abby — she was playing a part. She was doing what the producers told her to do. Reality TV is far more scripted and constructed than the audience ever realizes, that’s part of the game. Because it all is a game. It’s manipulation, it’s narratives that are put forth by the producers, those little girls and moms and even Abby were all told what to say, how to say it, with a clear goal in mind from the producers. That was part of their contracts. That’s what they were being paid to do. It was a job. That’s just how reality television works — including your favorite HGTV shows like House Hunters or Love it or List it. Yes, there’s serendipitous moments, but the edited nature of these shows demonstrate how curated and controlled the storylines are. They have very little to do with actual reality.
Still, Dance Moms is hard to stomach when you take a look at it from a distance, intellectually, and realize that although Abby was the biggest bully on the show, the moms were bullies, and the sweet little girls on the show bullied each other too. While Abby was the bully with the most clout, the moms could be awful to her, each other, to the other kids, and even their own kids. All caught on camera. Usually, when a mom stood up to Abby, the mom was framed in a positive light, as sticking up for their kid, even if they do so in a misguided and oftentimes dramatically undiplomatic, uncivil, impolite, and confrontational way. Again, that’s what makes good television. It’s hard to gauge how much was scripted vs organic, but some of the fights were so heated you know the producers did not write or plan them out. Great lines such as “get your finger out of my face” and “monstrosity of evil” were dropped by angry momma bears, too golden and emotionally potent to have been scripted, at least in my mind’s eye.
There are, in my mind’s eye, two girls who became the most famous from being on Dance Moms. Once is Maddie Ziegler, who starred in Sia’s music video for the song Chandelier opposite Shia Lebeouf. She, however, didn’t really leverage this explosive fame into a successful career outside of Dance Moms. She’s been in a handful of shows and films over the years, but mainly cameos, indie stuff, nothing big, nothing huge, nothing that has really put her name on the map the same way the Chandelier music video did.
The other girl who became extraordinarily famous from Dance Moms is the one and only Jojo Siwa. She actually started on a spin off reality tv show called Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition. While she didn’t win, she made it super far, and was impressive for having such stage presence for such a young kid. She was uninhibited, free, crazy, energetic, and that personality rubbed quite a few of her fellow competitors the wrong way, especially some of their mothers. Her own mother, Jessalyn, didn’t seem to care. Jessalyn always knew Jojo would be a star, and she did everything in her power to actualize that dream. She started dying her hair blonde at the age of 2. This quick fact really explains a lot about Jessalyn as a parent. Jojo came onto the show Dance Moms as a potential replacement for Chloe Lukasiak, a fan favorite sweet girl portrayed as an underdog because Abby had a lot of issues with her mother Christi, and would punish Chloe for her mother’s mistakes. None of the fans wanted Chloe to leave, but many were very excited for the addition of Jojo. She was already growing her fandom, the “siwanators”.
Jojo being an outsider, brought on as a potential replacement, already made her isolated from the other girls. They called her crazy quite often. They bullied her. In an especially cruel moment, Abby had them read aloud everything they liked and didn’t like about her, one by one. Jojo stands proudly, through her tears, and it is only after this humiliation that she is able to “earn” her Abby Lee Dance Company jacket, a symbol that she is an official member of the team. She stayed on the show for a couple more seasons, heavily criticized for her lack of technique, but praised for her stage presence as a performer.
And then she and Jessalyn went off to bigger and better opportunities. She became a pop princess for little girls, selling out Claire's stores with her trademarked hair bows, she had the aesthetic look of a maximalist toddler, and worked with Nickelodeon and even had her own reality television show, Siwa’s Dance Pop Revolution, where she and her mom had many young dancers compete to be a part of Jojo’s band, XOMG Pop! However, according to a recent expose in the Rolling Stones, Jojo and her mother perpetuated a lot of the bullying, abusive behaviors that they experienced on Dance Moms from Abby Lee Miller, the other moms, and the other kids. They were nasty and cruel to these poor girls and their mothers because they felt empowered to do so, because they didn’t seem to see anything wrong with the toxic way they were treated, as long as they were the ones inflicting it onto others. It’s incredibly hypocritical and quite revolting.
Jojo, having built a brand and an image based off positivity and anti-bullying, seems to rebranding on instagram as more adult in lieu of the allegations, a change away from her kiddie friendly image, something she began to do when she came out as a lesbian, and was excluded from Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards as a result, which she heavily criticized as an act of bullying. Maybe now she is finally old enough to curate her own image for herself, maybe it is all just smoke and mirrors from a very smart management team, it’s unclear. Fame and stardom and reality television do nothing but distort reality. We will never know the real Jojo Siwa. She has become an image, a brand, her entire identity became a marketable entity to capitalize upon. She was just a little girl when she became famous, even if she wanted it, even if she liked it. It just feels so morally wrong to me. She should have been playing with barbies and getting pushed down slides and eating dirt on a dare. Instead, she was intensely harassed, attacked, bullied, made to wear pounds and layers of makeup, forced to perform like a little circus monkey. I feel a deep sadness for her. I wonder if she would ever want to delete all her social media and go live in a foreign country where nobody knows her name, or if the fame is too addicting, too powerful, all she’s even known now — it’s been pretty much almost all of her life that she’s been in front of the camera, smiling, performing, making others rich off her spark and talent.
I don’t think Jessalyn feels guilty for what she did to her daughter. I think she is proud. I think it is her wildest dream she will never achieve but she achieved it for her daughter. I wonder if she ever thinks of the cost, the price. It’s probably pretty easy to ignore when you live in luxury, with extreme wealth. I wonder what Jojo thinks about it, her childhood, her fame, her public persona. I wonder if she’s educated. I wonder if she’s happy. She’s very similar to Ellen — a blonde lesbian that the public loved until they started to love to hate them, for a “justified” reason, for a misleading persona, for a reveal that this person who seems so great maybe doesn’t act so great. Time will tell if the culture will forgive and forget with Jojo Siwa, and maybe Ellen just needs a better management team. Or maybe Ellen decided she was done with all the drama that comes along with being in the public eye. I wonder if Jojo craves that drama, if she needs it, if she doesn’t know who she is without it. I worry about her. She was just a little girl and someone who loved her should have fought harder to protect her. Maybe she didn’t need it or want it, but I do wonder if it was all worth it, if asked if she would do it all again. I wonder if she ever thinks about what she experienced, does she have the foresight to see that she was exploited? I hope she gets there one day, because she deserves to heal, to mourn the childhood she lost, to feel sad for the sweet little girl who was wacky and crazy but just wanted to be loved. I hope she chooses to heal, for that little girl’s sake. We all carry around the ghosts and skeletons of our little girl bodies, well into womanhood and adulthood. Some wounds cut so deep we forget that they are bleeding.
I chose to write this piece in a very conversational tone, as if I were talking to a friend. The genre is semi op-ed, semi review, definitely a cultural engagement, something you’d read on vox or vulture. I wanted to discuss not just television, but the pop culture surrounding it, and the repercussions and consequences of television consumption, and celebrity status. Maybe the correct style for it could be considered a blog? I didn’t really abide by any conventions per se, besides the ones of like, not swearing. But I kept my tone extremely casual, because I was writing to an audience of girls like me, who understand and know what I’m talking about because they watched the same show as me growing up. I tried to explain things broadly, so that it would have mass appeal and wouldn’t be confusing to other audiences, but I really was writing for young women around the same age as me, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger, but young women who were once little girls watching this show. Maybe they think about how messed up it was, maybe they don’t, but if they were to read my writing, maybe they would see it a little bit more from my perspective. From the viewpoint of sadness. That I was just a kid and didn’t know better. That I liked the show but was too young to think critically about it. And now that I’m old enough to think critically about, as much as I loved the show, I don’t think it ever should have existed in the first place if any of those mothers really understood what they were signing up for, I wonder if they would still do it. How much of those mothers being involved was them wanting the best for their daughters, and how much of it was them wanting to be on television themselves? Now that the show is over, all the mothers have podcasts about their time on the show. They are still milking their poor daughters for every cent they can get. It makes me feel sick. The girls who follow Dance Moms know this, must see this, and see the way the girls have grown up. Kendall has had some terrible lip fillers. Kahlani just had a breast reduction. McKenzie got a nose job and wrote a song about her daddy issues. They’re all still young girls, young women now, and barely any of them dance. I think that says a lot.
Even though I feel like I strayed from genre conventions with my extremely casual and conversational tone, I tried my best to focus on the show, and choose just one girl to focus on as a case study. When I landed on bullying as my topic, I felt quite overwhelmed cause there’s a million different directions you could attack that issue from in regards to the show, cause the show is just completely awash in bullying and abusive language/behavior. But I thought Jojo Siwa was the most potent example, not only because she’s the most famous/well known, but because of how she (allegedly) perpetuated that cycle of abuse. I don’t know how much culpability she should have, seeing as she was just a kid herself, but I think it says a lot about the values of her mother, a woman willing to bully other moms, and other kids while on the show — but who knows if that was scripted or reality?
I write a lot of film reviews, and this has been one of my only writings about television. I found it much much much more difficult because a film is tight, confined, it’s only 2 hours and that’s all there is. Dance Moms is a show that spans 9 seasons. That’s hours of footage, of dances, of drama, of bullying, of crazy moms and sad daughters. It was incredibly difficult for me to focus, and I think that’s apparent in my writing too. I just have so many ideas and I tried my best to focus in on bullying and Jojo Siwa, but I think I just wanted to write so much about every thought I have about everything I just kinda got lost in my own writing. I’m not sure how much that comes across, maybe a ton, maybe a little, but it’s how I feel. I know this isn’t my best or greatest piece of work, but it was a challenge, and I’m proud of myself for putting my thoughts on the page as eloquently as I could. I may now be 22, but I still don’t want to go to the Olympics or be perfect. Oftentimes I feel like I still just want to be a little kid, even if that’s impossible, even if I still feel like one.