There’s a brand new parenting trend doing the rounds – but if you thought ‘snowplough’ or ‘intensive’ sounded bad, this one’s even worse. Admittedly, it’s less of a ‘trend’ and more a so-called ‘lol’, but still not one I can get behind.
Because the current thing for parents to do seems to be: pranking your kids – then posting it online.
YouTube stars Cole and Savannah LaBrant, who have more than 8.8 million followers on their YouTube channel The LaBrant Fam, found themselves in hot water with fans after deciding to prank their six-year-old daughter for this year’s April Fool’s Day.
And in a misjudged stunt that has been widely criticised, they told little Everleigh they were going to have to give away the beloved family pet – a tiny Pomeranian dog called Carl.
They posted the video, entitled ‘We Have To Give Our Puppy Away … Saying Goodbye Forever’ on 1 April. Everleigh is shown looking distraught and bursts into tears – even after she’s told it is just a ‘joke’.
Even their own followers have labelled the prank “traumatising” and the family have since disabled comments on all their videos. They’ve also addressed the criticism they’ve received in a new video (but the original is still online).
Take the recent #cheesechallenge as another example: one of the weirdest things to have swept social media recently (and that’s really saying something) was people filming themselves chucking cheese at their children, then posting it on Twitter. And not even posh cheese, for fromage’s sake – but those really cheap, processed, orange and yellow slices. Yuk. We wrote about it here.
Of course, it’s not the quality of the produce I object to, but the sheer humiliation of the act. The babies in the cheese-throwing videos (and I confess, I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of them all the way through, because I find the whole thing genuinely upsetting) – just look shocked and confused. How... hilarious. Not.
It reminds me of the way I used to feel about Jackass – the US reality TV show that featured a bunch of guys carrying out stunts and pranks on each other, their families and sometimes, members of the unsuspecting public. I wasn’t a fan. Call me humourless if you like, but I just don’t see the funny side of inflicting pain, shame and embarrassment on people, then making that humiliation public.
And the same goes for pranking our kids. More so, in fact – because we’re supposed to be the ones that protect them from this kind of crap. The ones we want them to confide in if someone at school does something horrible in the guise of ‘a laugh’: like sticking a nasty sticker to their back, or calling them names, or posting something embarrassing online.
If our kids can’t rely on us for fear of having the same abject humiliation played out by the very people they’re supposed to be able to trust, then they’ll have nowhere left to turn. And as a parent, I don’t want that.
Not even for the sake of a ‘like’ or two.