In the social media economy, attention is currency. Even if it comes at the expense of your kids.
The egg crack challenge is the latest craze sweeping TikTok. It isn’t a fun dance routine, ASMR cleaning videos, or #GirlDinner. It’s a prank that consists of cracking an egg on your kid’s forehead and seeing how they respond.
Almost universally, they are reacting badly. (I mean, wouldn’t you?) In a compilation video, which shows several young kids having eggs smashed on their heads, the children all react with shock and dismay. Some cry, some whine, some just look confused. One little girl tells her mother, “What the hell?” Another boy smacks his dad back.
“That wasn’t very nice,” says one little girl sadly, as two adult women laugh beside her. “[Should I] do it to you?”
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Despite the fact that grown adults should know, as the girl said, smashing an egg on someone’s head is not nice, the egg crack challenge has taken off on TikTok. It’s easy to see why. The hashtags #eggcrackchallenge, #eggcrackprank, and #eggcrack have more than 300 million video views combined, with some of the top videos getting millions and millions of views.
This isn’t the first prank to go viral at the expense of young kids. Last year parents were throwing slices of cheese on their babies. “NO HATERS! This trend is hilarious! 😂 I love my baby,” wrote one user on a video of her infant looking puzzled at a slice being thrown at their head. The video has been viewed nearly 5 million times.
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Another trend that’s gone around since 2020 has parents taking a bottle of water and flicking it onto their baby’s face. In one, which has been viewed nearly 2 million times, the baby topples over in surprise.
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However, as the egg cracking trend has grown in popularity, some prominent parenting creators are speaking out against it. Nika Diwa, who has 2.4 million followers on TikTok, made a video under the hashtag #eggcrackprank with her daughter. Instead of hitting her daughter with an egg, Diwa says to the camera, “Stop hitting your kids with eggs.”
“It’s so easy nowadays to want to hop on a trend just because it’s viral without thinking of the consequences,” Diwa tells Glamour. “But as a parent, we have a greater responsibility to steward our littles well and to do our best to protect them from potential harm.”
Diwa, the mother of two little girls, says the videos she saw of the challenge upset her because the children seemed confused.
“These littles have brains and bodies that are still developing and cannot understand or consent to these types of trends,” she adds. “I understand most parents would never intentionally harm their kids and are doing it in the name of innocent fun. But for the sake of making our kids feel optimally safe, I think it’s worth pausing to ask ourselves: Is the potential damage really worth a couple likes on social media?”
Victoria, a parenthood TikTok creator with more than 200,000 followers, agrees. She made a video featuring her toddler son, but instead of smacking him with the egg, she hit in on her own head. Her son thought it was hilarious.
“I often have my son in the kitchen with me while I’m cooking, and my goal was to just make him laugh,” she tells Glamour. “That should be the goal of all pranks, to make another person laugh, not cry.”
She also isn’t a fan of the trend, especially because her son loves being with her as she cooks.
“My first impression of the trend was that it was a bit mean, seeing these young children all excited to help their parents in the kitchen, only for them to be startled by the act of having the egg cracked on their heads,” she says. “You could really tell that some of them genuinely got their feelings hurt in the process.”
The children’s reactions have also been troubling to Amanda Mathers, a pediatric occupational therapist who specializes in working with kids from birth until age five. She posted her own TikTok warning against the trend and tells Glamour that young children cannot understand this sort of prank is a joke.
“The quick change from a look of excitement to pure defeat and betrayal that I saw on the children’s faces in many of the videos shared was heartbreaking,” she says. “The absence of response and supportive care I noticed in many videos when a young child is communicating that they are hurt, embarrassed, and upset can affect the formation of the developing brain, impairing later learning and behavior.”
She notes that if a child only feels this way once, it obviously won’t impact them in a huge way, but if it happens repeatedly it could. And there are other drawbacks to scaring kids with pranks.
“Short-term, a child may lose that deep trust in the comfort of their parents,” she says. “ I do recognize this is only a 90-second-or-less video and we don’t get the full picture, so I never want to judge a family but rather to educate on the emotional and behavioral effects it may have.”
In response to some of the backlash, some people are doing the challenge with a twist: cracking the egg on their dog’s head instead. In one video the dog seemed unfazed, but commenters were still mad. Another dog was more shady.
“First the kids now the dogs 😭💀,” wrote one person.
In a social media landscape where any mom, dad, and cute kid is one viral video away from brand deals and internet fame, it can be tempting to follow trends like these pranks on the app in hopes of getting noticed. But hurting and embarrassing kids (and pets!) just to get a few likes on social media is taking it way too far.
Mathers says that there are plenty of ways to prank their kids that not only is funny for the parent but also for the child.
“Pranking your children can be fun, but there are less harmful, fun ways to prank,” she says. “Put googly eyes on the eggs or put a whoopie cushion under a seat. Something that doesn’t cause physical harm or a breach of trust.”
