Is your child’s cry worth how many likes? – 08/24/2023 – Education

The scene begins with a woman and her son, approximately 4 years old, in a kitchen, in front of a plastic bowl, as if they were cooking together. Suddenly, she takes an egg and breaks it on the child’s head, who gets scared and rubs his hand over his face, not understanding what happened. In another similar video, a little girl, also caught off guard by her mother’s attitude, bursts into tears as the woman laughs at the camera. Soon after, to calm her down, she allows her daughter to do the same: she cracks an egg on her forehead. All filmed, posted and viralized.

These are just two examples among hundreds of a trend on TikTok that has been very popular in recent weeks. Trends are, in free translation, network trends, which engage thousands of users to reproduce a certain performance, which can be a dance, a challenge, a dubbing or even a joke — at least at first. The idea is to participate in the moment and, if possible, go viral, gaining visibility and, of course, followers.

But videos like the trend do ovo cannot be seen only as potential memes — no matter how successful they are among many people — for a reason that should be obvious: they expose children to derogatory situations. And the perpetrators of humiliation are themselves responsible for them.

“It is everyone’s duty to ensure the dignity of children and adolescents, putting them safe from any inhuman, violent, terrifying, vexatious or embarrassing treatment”, says article 18 of the Statute of Children and Adolescents (ECA). The text also adds that they have the right to be cared for “without the use of cruel or degrading treatment”.

In addition to hurting the ECA and affecting the family bond, since psychologists point out that attitudes such as those shown in the videos can mean a breach of trust between mothers/fathers and children, content of this type increases the practice of sharing (term used to define the sharing images of children) to even more worrying levels.

Of course, today, childhood records are no longer imprisoned in printed photo albums or VHS recordings, as they were a few decades ago. Even before they are born, babies already have their own profiles on social networks – some with millions of followers, like the children of celebrities. And it is also necessary to remember that these platforms have been important for women to share their experiences with motherhood, openly addressing issues that were previously invisible, such as the exhaustion and overload to which mothers are subjected.

However, unlike the photos and videos of birthday parties, christenings or birthday parties in the 80s and 90s, images posted on TikTok and Instagram can be seen and reviewed by invaluable audiences. They can be liked, commented on, shared, and manipulated incessantly by acquaintances and strangers alike. And they cannot be erased, which leads us to the question: what effect will all this exposure, often embarrassing, have on the lives of these future adults?

Even in cases of videos of crying children that turned into chains of affection and support, such as the little Australian boy Quaden, filmed in 2020 by his mother after being bullied, it is important to emphasize that there is no way to predict whether a piece of content will go viral, very least how will be the reaction of the exponential number of people who will have access to it.

The digital environment is already full of risks of different severity scales for children and adolescents. Those responsible for them need to focus on protecting them, controlling and qualifying their use of social networks, apps and games, not on ridiculing them in exchange for likes.