If you are a parent with a YouTube account, I have a resolution for you for 2012. It's time to vow you will stop being mean to your kids in exchange for 15 minutes of Internet fame. You think it makes you look hilarious. But it just makes you look like a jerk.
And these days, you're not even an original jerk! Just check out the video that showed up this week of a mom giving her Chicago White Sox loving 6-year-old daughter a gift bag full of Chicago Cubs stuff. She tricked her on purpose, and not surprisingly, got a pretty sad result:
I don't know about you, but my first reaction was to be feel like this little girl got a raw deal. If someone gave me Red Sox crap, I'd probably cry too. Gift giving -- to me -- is about making someone's face light up with joy, not breaking their heart, young or old. The second? It feels like something I've seen a dozen times before. And I had -- more or less. It always goes something like this:
Parent gets devious idea of way to make child upset. Parent sets up the video camera and puts plan in action. Kid cries. Parent laughs maniacally. Parent begins YouTube upload while rubbing hands together with glee. Internet guffaws at kid's expense.
But it's kind of like laughing when someone falls down: the fact that it tickled your funnybone doesn't mean the person didn't get hurt. And at least when someone falls down, they generally weren't set up to do so. These parents, on the other hand, purposely set their kids up to be hurt.
Think about that for a second. Hurting a child on purpose. It doesn't seem so funny anymore, does it? Mom and Dad just became the ultimate bullies.
This isn't to say that all YouTube videos involving kids are bad. Things caught on the fly fill me with glee on a weekly basis; and I often write about them here on The Stir. But there's a fine line between sharing some of the wacky moments of parenting and purposely trying to turn your kid into the butt of everyone's jokes.
Do these type of videos make you laugh or make you uncomfortable?
Image via YouTube
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Comments 48
I really don't get being purposely mean to your kids for laughs.
Lock me up. I laughed. Why would a 6 year old be so traumatized by sports paraphernalia? Maybe we need to look into that instead. Bad bad parenting? no! You act like that is the only gift that kid got. I'm sure there are a heck of a lot more things that will happen to this girl that will land her in therapy. "Doctor it all started when I was six and my mother gave me a PRESENT and put it on Youtube." There was nothing else out there that you could be outraged about? You must live a pretty charmed life.
That woman was a giant douche.
I don't like them either, but what bothers me most about the trend is that people laugh at some of these children who are so hideously spoiled, bratty and terrible, ones who cuss out their parents. Ugh!
Then again, I don't watch the videos of people getting hurt and laugh either.
I gave up watching that ...it cuts it off every other second..annoyed with youtube as it is..people have some spoiled children as well as making them look dumb too...makes me sad to think people think this is funny...when iti showed both..idiotic behavior on parents and how spoiled the child is...if she was older she wouldn't have cried so much..well unless this is based on total spoiled child syndrome..