That’s the most disturbing part of these videos: the parents barely interact with their children. Instead, they relate to a mirror image of their children that they are spreading online. And they delight in their power over that image.
Children in crisis have been a screen fascination since the beginning of screens. In the 1896 silent short film by the Lumière brothers “child fight,” two elegant babies in lace bonnets fight over a silver spoon from adjacent high chairs, slapping and crying and then comforting each other while the filmmakers, presumably, look on. More recently, equally embarrassing images have been mailed to “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” forwarded on chain emails and uploaded to YouTube.
But TikTok and its Instagram competitor, Reels, have made that content ubiquitous. You don’t need to be a filmmaker or even a dedicated family vlogger to casually offer your offspring to the viral gods. The apps are always up and running with new messages inviting parents to show their big babieshis ugly babieshis ugly baby glitter. It feels so easy: you have your phone, you have your child, and thanks to the child, you have nothing else to do except look at your phone. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the egg-cracking challenge took off at the end of August, in the desperate last days of the summer holidays.
It’s seductive for new parents to think of our children as an extension of ourselves, and social media makes that fantasy visceral. Profiles that once featured photographs of our own faces now feature photographs of our children. Babies are cute (even those their parents announce as ugly) and their emotions are overwhelming and operatic. Furthermore, as we grow older and less algorithmically favored, our children brim with beauty and enthusiasm. When they are babies, objectifying them seems simple: we carry them, we dress them and feed them, we choreograph their lives. Babies at least seem to be under our control. It is known that small children do not do this.
If the cheese slice trick imagines the baby as a kind of benign Mr. Potato Head figure, the egg-cracking challenge sees the child as a Whac-a-Mole, a cunning adversary who must be beaten into submission. Both tendencies imagine that the child himself functions as a device, with a “tame switch” or a “grumpy switch” that we can flip for our own comfort or amusement. Inside the phone, a child can be trained, filmed, refilmed, spliced and filtered. A child can be saved or eliminated.