TikTok's #kidscursingchallenge Is Dangerous. Here's Why.

OK, the bathroom is a safe space…I’m gonna go out of the bathroom, and you can say all the curse words you’ve got inside of you…this is where you can get them out.

Perhaps you’ve seen the #bathroomcursingchallenge, #cursingkids, or #cursingchallenge videos on TikTok, and you’ve felt kind of yucky about them, but you can’t pinpoint exactly what’s bothering you. If you’re a Post-Traumatic Parent, you may be disturbed by this kind of content but also disturbingly fascinated by it.

Let’s unpack what’s problematic about this challenge and what’s problematic about most TikTok challenges involving kids.

1) The bathroom may be a safe space—but the internet isn’t.

When a parent is filming their child for the sake of content creation, the focus moves off the child and parenting and onto an algorithm. Children trust their parents—because the number one job of parenting is teaching kids How To Human 101, and part of that is how to handle the world. The child trusts that their parent is teaching them a technique to manage frustration, but the parent is looking for cute content to post.

We teach our middle-schoolers to think ten times before they post something because the internet is forever. Yet parents are willingly allowing their children to be on the internet, in a vulnerable position. Are we sure that everyone watching these videos is simply thinking how cute the incongruity of those words coming out of this cute little mind and body are? Are we sure we're not exposing them to an exploitative gaze?

2) Exploitation and Consent: Confusion of Tongues

At some point, these children will grow up, and they’re going to realize that their innocence was exploited for the sake of some “likes” or “saves” or “shares.” Their sense of trust in their parents is going to be shaken up—because Mommy lied to me. She said this is a safe space, but it isn’t. The internet is the exact opposite of a safe space. This can interfere with the basis of attachment—the first stage of psychosocial development—trust vs. mistrust. (For more on how TikTok challenges can interfere with attachment, click here and here.)

For some of these children, the realization that my parent was my first bully—the first person who mocked me, took advantage of my innocence, and set me up for harm—is going to be devastating.

In the classic "Confusion of Tongues" paper, Salvador Ferenczi talks about how confusing exploitative parenting can be. While he is speaking of incest, exploitation isn’t always sexual. Whenever an adult has a different agenda than a child, and there’s a lack of consent, there’s a potential for exploitation and there’s a potential for objectification.

The child trusts the parent to teach them a stress management tool—if you have bad words to say, say them in the bathroom. The parent is looking for a cute kid to put on TikTok for some cultural capital. That’s what objectification is—taking the humanity out of a person, reducing them to one aspect of self, and denying them informed consent. Children can’t consent. The fact that they’re innocents is why these videos go viral—which means they’re being objectified.

The realization that my parent was the first person to exploit, confuse, and set me up for harm—that realization is going to be devastating for some of these children.

3) It’s not the “what.” It’s the “why.”

One disturbing video showed a little girl whisper-screaming a violent argument between two adults (there were plenty of pejorative terms of “female” and “male” to make the different parts of the script crystal clear, with threats of violence and murder.) She repeated this dialogue over and over, getting overstimulated as she did so. Even more tragically, this video was apparently filmed at daycare. Scrolling along the bottom of the video were the words “with permission of mom.”

Watching these challenges as a child psychologist, it seems likely that many of these children are reenacting violent and angry confrontations between their parents or other caregivers. If you’ve ever used play in psychotherapy with traumatized children, you’ll see this scripted, rigid quality as children reenact, sometimes word for word, exactly what they’ve seen at home. This kind of rigid, repetitive play is clearly described by Lenore Terr in Too Scared to Cry, and it becomes unmistakeable once you've seen it a few times.

Very often, post-traumatic parents come into classes worrying about the “whats” of behavior: What should I do when my kid curses? What should I do to stop it? What should I do when my kid hits, procrastinates, destroys property, etc.?

It’s the wrong question.

The right question is, “Why is my kid cursing, destroying property, procrastinating, hitting his sister?”

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In these videos, the question shouldn’t be, “What should we do about this little girl cursing?” The question should be, “Why is this little girl cursing? How can we help her?”

Did anyone sit these children down and say, “Wow, it’s really scary when people yell words like that to each other. When did you hear that? Let’s talk about it…”?

Aside from the exploitative nature of these videos, children learn to curse from somewhere, and some children have some disturbing scenes inside their psyches, that are clearly doing damage. What we are witnessing isn't a TikTok challenge. We're witnessing childhood trauma, and the first ingredients of what could eventually be adult complex PTSD.

How Children Ask for Help

Children often don’t know how to ask for help with the words “Will you please help me?” It’s rare that a four-year-old will go to a daycare teacher and say, “I feel really yucky inside. I have lots of big emotions. Mom came home late and Dad was yelling that he would kill her, and she was yelling back at him. I’m scared and confused.”

Instead, that little girl will knock over a littler kid and yell some of the aforementioned curse words at him.

That’s how little kids usually ask for help—through behavior. Sometimes, they do so with words, and even with explicit words, but not with the words that explicitly say—“Can you help me? I’m scared.”

Let’s hear the words underneath the words when children are cursing in the bathroom.

Let’s stop exploiting and objectifying them, and start helping them instead.

Children deserve the same dignity, respect, and concern as adults. It’s time to start giving it to them.