The danger of pranks played by parents on young children – 09/09/2023 – Equilíbrio

The trend of parents pranking their children on social media ignores an important fact — young children have not yet developed their sense of humor enough to be able to find the situation funny.

One of the most recent trends to go viral on social media is breaking an egg on a child’s head.

In one of the videos, a little boy wearing a dinosaur t-shirt is filmed in front of an empty bowl and appears to be waiting for something. Next to him, there is a woman — who is apparently his guardian — holding an egg. As he watches, she breaks the egg not on the bowl, but on the boy’s forehead.

“Ouch, that hurts,” he says, rubbing his forehead.

On August 30, the hashtag #eggcrackchallenge (egg cracking challenge, in English) had accumulated almost 75 million views on TikTok. Most of the children in the videos appear to be young, often preschool age.

And although everyone has a different reaction to being pranked — some say it hurts, others seem surprised, some burst into tears or even push, or hit their parents — there is a common behavior. Almost all of them don’t think it’s funny at all… while their parents are laughing their heads off.

This behavior isn’t a surprise, psychologists say, and there are a number of reasons for it. For starters, most young children cannot understand the humor in pranking someone. Cracking an egg is just the most recent example.

Additionally, there is an issue involving children being filmed and shown on the internet without their consent to audiences that sometimes number in the millions.

The truth is that playing “pranks” or doing “trolling” (as this type of video is often called in Brazil) is a boring game for children and also at least for some of the adults watching.

There’s a reason we’re uncomfortable with this kind of prank: There’s a fine line between pranking and bullying, experts say.

This is even more true when the victim is less powerful than the person doing the prank—so an unspoken rule of humor is to make fun of those who are on top, not those who are at their worst. And between an adult and a child, the child will always be the most vulnerable party.

It’s obvious that even for adults and teenagers, being the victim of a prank isn’t always funny.

If the prank is funny, it’s usually because the victim immediately realizes what’s happening, hasn’t been hurt or hurt in any way, and is quickly able to laugh with the prankster, says psychologist Rachel Melville-Thomas, spokeswoman for UK Association of Child Psychotherapists.

“What we want is for people to laugh together. Laughing together creates cohesion in the social group,” she says.

“If you’re the victim of a prank, for it to be funny, you have to realize it quickly and think ‘oh, what a well-designed prank’. It’s difficult for that to happen if you’re hitting someone on the head.”

And for a young child, “getting the hang of” the type of humor involved in a prank is more difficult due to the stage of development they are in.

In fact, children can understand humor from a young age, but not all types. Some research shows that children aged 5 and 6 can already understand more sophisticated types of humor — such as sarcasm and irony — and some children as young as 4 or 3 can already understand jokes.

But the kind of humor involved in a prank is difficult for young children because the ability to understand it is linked to so-called “theory of mind.”

It is the ability to attribute mental states to both oneself and others. This allows us to understand that people can think, feel, and have different expectations from each other.

Although this varies from child to child, this skill typically matures between the ages of 3.5 and 4.5 (and continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence).

But even if the child has this ability, there are limits. And just like any other skill, humor has an on and off switch.

Understanding the mood of a situation “is a complex process that involves cognitive, behavioral, emotional, social and physiological components”, say research.

Some experts also wonder how, given the physical violation involved (and the fact, from some children’s reactions, that the prank appears to have hurt them), some people find this type of prank especially funny.

Researchers say internet prank videos, and particularly those that focus on the victim’s emotional response and pain, are the ugly side of social media culture.

A commonly accepted theory about what makes something funny is expectations breaking. It is theorized that this is why many people find slapstick humor funny, for example.

Much of the early humor that children develop derives from a growing sense of the absurd. “Young children find out-of-place things like an elephant in a hat funny,” says Melville-Thomas.

“The problem with this [brincadeira] is that it is absolutely unexpected. It’s set in a cute ‘let’s cook with mommy’ situation, and then you basically hit your kid.”

“It’s a prank, not a joke,” says the psychologist. “Not only are they not able to cognitively understand humor, they are also the butt of jokes. And there is a breakdown of trust.”

Breach of trust

When the prank is done by the child’s parents, grandparents or guardians in general, what ends up scaring the child the most is precisely this breach of trust.

“For a child under five, parents (or guardians) are the basis of security,” says Melville-Thomas. “Guardians are the safety net, in which the child can always trust and know that the person will not hurt them,” she says.

Cracking an egg on a child’s forehead violates that trust.

“Parents put the reward they will receive on the internet — hits, views, likes or something like that — above the concern about how their child will respond to that situation,” she says.

“At that moment, the parent’s need or desire overwhelmingly outweighs the child’s need, with consequences. As a mother, my own needs are more important than the child’s needs on several occasions, but not in a way that harms the relationship we we have — that she can trust me, I’m not going to hit her.”

The child psychotherapist says she is also worried about the fear generated, that the child will be afraid that that prank will happen again.

Even among adults, repeated internet pranks between couples can have a negative impact on relationships.

What’s particularly interesting to experts like Melville-Thomas and Paige Davis, a developmental psychologist at St. John’s University in York, is that when the children in the videos respond negatively — as often happens — the parents often laugh.

This shows a lack of attunement, they say, which is the opposite of what most child development experts today advise.

None of this is to say that a father who participates in a prank fad has ruined his relationship with his son, says Melville-Thomas. No parent is perfect, nor should they be.

But even in situations like this, an apology is important — because what’s crucial is the impact the prank had on the child, not what the caregiver’s intention was, experts say.

“It’s better to try to talk about it rather than pretend it never happened,” says Melville-Thomas.

“You might say, ‘The other day we were cooking and I thought it would be funny to surprise you by cracking an egg on your head because I saw other people doing it. It actually hurt. I’m sorry,'” she advises.

“If you make an apology, the father is really giving his son an explanation, setting an example. The father is setting an example of how to make amends for things he regrets. And that’s great.”

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This text was originally published here.