Victoria, a parenthood TikTok creator with more than 200,000 followers, agrees. She made a video featuring her toddler son, but instead of smacking him with the egg, she hit in on her own head. Her son thought it was hilarious.
“I often have my son in the kitchen with me while I’m cooking, and my goal was to just make him laugh,” she tells Glamour. “That should be the goal of all pranks, to make another person laugh, not cry.”
She also isn’t a fan of the trend, especially because her son loves being with her as she cooks.
“My first impression of the trend was that it was a bit mean, seeing these young children all excited to help their parents in the kitchen, only for them to be startled by the act of having the egg cracked on their heads,” she says. “You could really tell that some of them genuinely got their feelings hurt in the process.”
The children’s reactions have also been troubling to Amanda Mathers, a pediatric occupational therapist who specializes in working with kids from birth until age five. She posted her own TikTok warning against the trend and tells Glamour that young children cannot understand this sort of prank is a joke.
“The quick change from a look of excitement to pure defeat and betrayal that I saw on the children's faces in many of the videos shared was heartbreaking,” she says. “The absence of response and supportive care I noticed in many videos when a young child is communicating that they are hurt, embarrassed, and upset can affect the formation of the developing brain, impairing later learning and behavior.”
She notes that if a child only feels this way once, it obviously won’t impact them in a huge way, but if it happens repeatedly it could. And there are other drawbacks to scaring kids with pranks.
“Short-term, a child may lose that deep trust in the comfort of their parents,” she says. “ I do recognize this is only a 90-second-or-less video and we don’t get the full picture, so I never want to judge a family but rather to educate on the emotional and behavioral effects it may have.”
In response to some of the backlash, some people are doing the challenge with a twist: cracking the egg on their dog’s head instead. In one video the dog seemed unfazed, but commenters were still mad. Another dog was more shady.
“First the kids now the dogs 😭💀,” wrote one person.
In a social media landscape where any mom, dad, and cute kid is one viral video away from brand deals and internet fame, it can be tempting to follow trends like these pranks on the app in hopes of getting noticed. But hurting and embarrassing kids (and pets!) just to get a few likes on social media is taking it way too far.
Mathers says that there are plenty of ways to prank their kids that not only is funny for the parent but also for the child.
