This article was in today's paper. To me, it's incredible the depths that human stupidity can sink to.
The #PrankMyBaby trend isn’t harmless fun. It’s abuse.
By Susan Linn
December 20, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST
Susan Linn, a psychologist, is a research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital, a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author, most recently, of “Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.”
I recently took a deep and disturbing dive into TikTok, watching videos of parents hurting, scaring and otherwise upsetting — oops, I mean “pranking” — their very young children.
I saw toddlers — of the age when many children learn why feces must not be touched — becoming increasingly agitated when parents put a glob of fake poop on them, which the kids believed was real. I saw parents scaring babies by surprising them with frightening masks. I watched parents terrifying 5-year-olds about to start kindergarten by urging them to video-chat with their new teacher — then surprising them on screen not with their real teacher but with a horribly scary face.
In four videos, I saw one dad agitating his son enough to make him cry — then celebrating his infant as an excellent “actor.”
With trends such as #PrankMyBaby, this is all supposed to be in good fun. Such posts — which number in the hundreds across platforms — can garner hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views. Many seem to be posted by parents looking to profit from their families by attracting huge numbers of followers.
But this is often not fun for the young children being pranked. Depending on the child and what is being done to them, pranking kids of any age can be problematic. But setting up our youngest children as stooges for practical jokes is especially cruel.
Very young children — whose well-being relies on the consistent presence of beloved adults — don’t have the cognitive wherewithal to see the humor in being victimized by a prank. Their sense of what’s real and what isn’t is only just developing, and they tend to believe what they see and what they’re told. They need the grown-ups in their lives to be reliably trustworthy.
Posting videos of bewildered, frightened and sometimes sobbing children to social media sites compounds the damage. In addition to harming the children being pranked, the videos garner so much positive attention that they normalize objectifying kids, discounting their feelings and exploiting them for attention and money — which implicitly gives other parents permission to do the same. And unfortunately, as with so much in social media’s war for our attention, posts celebrating pranks generate copycats and encourage new, more extreme pranks.
I doubt most of the parents I observed on TikTok understand the psychological cost of their actions, and I believe they would be shocked to hear their pranks can do real harm. They also might not realize that posting these videos “could have dire consequences for families,” as Ed Howard, senior counsel of the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, told me.
In California, for instance, “if a parent is intentionally causing emotional trauma to their own child just to earn clicks and dollars,” Howard said, a county “might be able to remove the child from the care of their parents and maybe even terminate their status as a parent. And even if that parent didn’t subjectively mean to inflict emotional trauma on a child, if they did, it can still serve as a basis to remove a child from a home.”
So, how do we rein in this trend? One way is to publicize the potentially devastating consequences for wannabe-influencer parents who use their children to rack up clicks — such as in a Maryland case in which the extreme cruelty of a couple’s pranks resulted in their losing custody of two children.
We could also start to hold social media companies and parents accountable to state laws protecting child performers on traditional media such as television, video and film. While 33 states and Puerto Rico have such laws, they apply solely to traditional media and entertainment industries; only four states prohibit companies from undermining or compromising the welfare of child performers. Other states should follow suit, and all states should expand their laws to include children appearing in monetized vlogs and social media posts.
Short of legal protections, public health workers and early childhood experts should unite in condemning the practice of pranking young children. Strong statements from organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the World Health Organization could garner enough attention to at least make parents think twice before pranking and posting.
We all inadvertently hurt our children. We might, for instance, accidentally play too roughly, be unthinkingly dismissive of their feelings or snap at them when we’re stressed. But children suffer unnecessarily when we allow parents — and social media companies — to profit from videos in which babies, toddlers and preschoolers are purposely hurt.
The #PrankMyBaby trend isn’t harmless fun. It’s abuse.
By Susan Linn
December 20, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST
Susan Linn, a psychologist, is a research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital, a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author, most recently, of “Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.”
I recently took a deep and disturbing dive into TikTok, watching videos of parents hurting, scaring and otherwise upsetting — oops, I mean “pranking” — their very young children.
I saw toddlers — of the age when many children learn why feces must not be touched — becoming increasingly agitated when parents put a glob of fake poop on them, which the kids believed was real. I saw parents scaring babies by surprising them with frightening masks. I watched parents terrifying 5-year-olds about to start kindergarten by urging them to video-chat with their new teacher — then surprising them on screen not with their real teacher but with a horribly scary face.
In four videos, I saw one dad agitating his son enough to make him cry — then celebrating his infant as an excellent “actor.”
With trends such as #PrankMyBaby, this is all supposed to be in good fun. Such posts — which number in the hundreds across platforms — can garner hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views. Many seem to be posted by parents looking to profit from their families by attracting huge numbers of followers.
But this is often not fun for the young children being pranked. Depending on the child and what is being done to them, pranking kids of any age can be problematic. But setting up our youngest children as stooges for practical jokes is especially cruel.
Very young children — whose well-being relies on the consistent presence of beloved adults — don’t have the cognitive wherewithal to see the humor in being victimized by a prank. Their sense of what’s real and what isn’t is only just developing, and they tend to believe what they see and what they’re told. They need the grown-ups in their lives to be reliably trustworthy.
Posting videos of bewildered, frightened and sometimes sobbing children to social media sites compounds the damage. In addition to harming the children being pranked, the videos garner so much positive attention that they normalize objectifying kids, discounting their feelings and exploiting them for attention and money — which implicitly gives other parents permission to do the same. And unfortunately, as with so much in social media’s war for our attention, posts celebrating pranks generate copycats and encourage new, more extreme pranks.
I doubt most of the parents I observed on TikTok understand the psychological cost of their actions, and I believe they would be shocked to hear their pranks can do real harm. They also might not realize that posting these videos “could have dire consequences for families,” as Ed Howard, senior counsel of the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, told me.
In California, for instance, “if a parent is intentionally causing emotional trauma to their own child just to earn clicks and dollars,” Howard said, a county “might be able to remove the child from the care of their parents and maybe even terminate their status as a parent. And even if that parent didn’t subjectively mean to inflict emotional trauma on a child, if they did, it can still serve as a basis to remove a child from a home.”
So, how do we rein in this trend? One way is to publicize the potentially devastating consequences for wannabe-influencer parents who use their children to rack up clicks — such as in a Maryland case in which the extreme cruelty of a couple’s pranks resulted in their losing custody of two children.
We could also start to hold social media companies and parents accountable to state laws protecting child performers on traditional media such as television, video and film. While 33 states and Puerto Rico have such laws, they apply solely to traditional media and entertainment industries; only four states prohibit companies from undermining or compromising the welfare of child performers. Other states should follow suit, and all states should expand their laws to include children appearing in monetized vlogs and social media posts.
Short of legal protections, public health workers and early childhood experts should unite in condemning the practice of pranking young children. Strong statements from organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the World Health Organization could garner enough attention to at least make parents think twice before pranking and posting.
We all inadvertently hurt our children. We might, for instance, accidentally play too roughly, be unthinkingly dismissive of their feelings or snap at them when we’re stressed. But children suffer unnecessarily when we allow parents — and social media companies — to profit from videos in which babies, toddlers and preschoolers are purposely hurt.
