I remember first going into the haunted mansion.. I wanted to get off immediately when I was in line as a kid at Disney.. my parents got me out... They didn't force me when they knew I was a scared kid at the time... So when I see what looks like the parent holding the door closed for clout when your kid is tryna get out.. that's just crazy..
I LOVED Barney and saw him at an amusement park when I was about 3 or 4. I got very scared and couldn’t explain why, but I didn’t want to get close to him or give him a hug for a photo op. I remember my parents seeming quite disappointed because they thought they were taking me to see my idol lol. But they didn’t force me because they could see how scared I was. These people are ridiculous.
It does make sense though. You see Barney on TV so kids may not realize he’s huge. So when they see him in person some may get scared of how big he is lol
My parents took us on the Haunted Mansion and were shocked that we were scared because it was supposed to be funny. Like, sorry I didn’t have a conception of “kitsch” when I was 6 years old. At least I can laugh now because I know they meant well
Doesn’t really have to do with social media points in a lot of cases, and maybe not even in the cases you’re seeing uploaded here.
My uncles used to mess with my brother and i (their nephews) like this quite a bit when I was younger. There wasn’t really social media like that back then. They were just having fun
oh sorry let me clarify, the ellipsis represents that it is both equal parts horrible and moronic to risk giving your child nightmares for a week for fake Internet points.
Lack of emotional toughness is literally one of the current plagues of society. People like you are raising children into emotionally fragile device zombies. The melt down for everything that isn't given to them in the form of a trigger warning.
Emotional intelligence gets bent over a barrel by emotional control. Honestly the emotional anchoring of fear being tied to the device itself with the ghost is probably HELPING these kids to be suspicious of screens for the rest of their lives.
So true, teaching kids it's good to be cruel to others through their parents being needlessly cruel to them is great for society. Makes for really great collaboration.
You have no idea what you're talking about, it's astounding how sure you are that being mean to kids is good lol. Stay away from children.
Teaching kids that sometimes during Halloween season, people use make believe tricks to try to scare other people is a good way to allow them to function socially, and participate in regular society as they get older. Wrapping them in bubble wrap and never allowing them to experience anything in the world around them is a good way to make them socially inept, and unable to handle such things when they inevitably experience them as an adult.
It’s a filter on a phone video. If seeing a filter of a scary ghost on a phone video is enough to traumatize your child for life, they have no chance of surviving in the real world.
The kid isn't learning a lesson about mindless cruelty. The kid is immediately anchoring emotional fear directly onto the device. That's good. That's a good thing.
There is no gentle comfort conversation you can have with a kid to get them to understand the dopamine addiction of a phone. I get that you respect little kids like people and talk to them with reason but youre an idiot.
Events like the one in the OP are not only ethical, they are necessary. Teaching emotional control, being suspicious of devices at an almost instinctual level, being fundamentally anchored to that in a way that no conversation could achieve. It's literally pro-social behaviour.
You can teach kids things that are developmentally appropriate without terrifying them needlessly, like the parents in this video are doing. Why is that hard for you to grasp.
You will never reach the inside of their lizard brains more than you will when they are a kid. You agree? This 'scaring kids with fake phone ghosts' is powerful. It literally connects fear with the phone itself. There is no abstract connection for a small child, the connection is literal. Phone>Fear. That's good. That's a good thing why is that hard for you to grasp?
Bro just had an emotional meltdown on the internet because someone told him to get some emotional intelligence, but it's others that are the soft ones.
You got some serious emotional weakness and insecurity issues holy shit
Can I legit talk to you about this? I'm not gonna insult you or anything, it would be nice to debate it respectfully.
So you're saying that scaring kids with devices makes them afraid of the devices on an instinctual level, so that they are less likely to use devices in the future, and devices are bad so we should scare kids with them?
I would counter with: the fear does not get associated with the device, it gets associated with the parents and the environment (like the bathroom/mirror). The brain does not see the phone as the source of the fear. If it did, it would know that the fear is not real. The brain sees the phone as a window, showing you something that is real and in the room with you. The children believe the thing is in the room with them and thus they think "bathroom = unsafe. and later: parent = not to be trusted."
I mean I'm just trolling reddit wimps but after sticking to my guns for a bit in different comments yeah I see the utility of it.
Obviously we need to do peer reviewed research. I hold that these children are too young to have the abstract connection youre positing. I hold that the fear will be literally connected to the device, engendering a lifelong suspicion of the device and the content it shows.
The fear response is anchored to the object of that fear which is the phone.
In another comment I take it even further. The parents shouldnt confess the prank. In fact, there should be an app that will randomly elicit super creepy, scary, supernatural-esque sounds, even at night. The kid will never even want to be alone in a room with a device.
There is no "let's sit down with Jimothy and discuss the dangers of social surveillance devices to him" conversation that will ever attain the pure instinctual response of ongoing spooky phone shit.
Anything to counteract the dopamine.
edit: like usually you have to fight through tears and meltdowns trying to get these devices away from kids. But when the phone is randomly doing wailing, gurgling agonal breathing at 3am, I hypothesize that the kid wont want to even touch the phone. fear is a tool let's use it.
Yes. When i was a kid my cousins would tell
Me horror stories about looking into
Mirrors. I still get freaked out whenever im in the restroom late at night alone… im almost 30 now
Maybe I’m a giant pussy but I accidentally stumbled on a dead possum as a kid and it startled me so bad that I still think of how bad that fucked me up 30 years later
Genuinely possibly yes. This absolutely could trigger lifelong anxiety. Is it going to ruin their lives? Probably not. But for some of them it could fuck them up pretty significantly.
Lmao you don’t know me. I treasured those moments because it opened a door where I could prank my parents back and make it into a thing. I remembering scaring the shit out of my parents and making them drop food because of it. They couldn’t get mad at me because they showed me that pop up “scary” video with the car and road. And they continued.
Sorry you can’t say shit to me lil bro, I empathize when needed. Not when harmless pranks happen you nerd.
I'll cry into my coffee in my villa in the Algarve then bro! I've been blessed with the greatest parents and most privileged childhood any man could ask for and I pray your children will get a thousandth of the love and support I received growing up😆 Gen X are built differently fam.
No. I have a picture of an innocent hounded but beloved childrens entertainer with a long and extensive list of charities who he helped raise millions in funding for, who was friendly with princess Diana and who was never charged with anything and i live in a country where we follow the rule of law and presume anyone innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of their peers based on the evidence provided. Do you not? Must get scared at Halloween 👻 boo!
If you can find one little conviction with his name on I'll change my photo straight away to anything you ask for.
I dunno I got told so many ghost stories and saw some shit as a kid and I was never traumatised. I got nightmares for a week or 2 sure but that's about it. Reddit community just like to exaggerate. Weak ass generation
I feel it in my bones that you are one of these distinguished gentleman who jerks off to the “tell em Large Marge sent ya” reveal in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure or the scene in Superman III where the computer turns that woman into a robot. As am I.
Scaring people is a right of passage. Starts with getting a good scary story or jump scare yourself. Edit. And if it’s not cool with them, you obviously stop.
My mom would prank us by standing on the other side of doors to jumpscare us as we opened them. Especially coming out of the bathroom. So one day I left a toy snake coiled in her bathroom. 😃
My brother froze one of those black spider rings inside an ice cube and put it in our mom's drink.
When she woke up from a nap she took a sip after it had melted and jumped onto her lips. She screamed so loud we heard it on the other side of the house.
It’s not the scare it’s the posting it online that does it for me. To me a scare is for fun, between the whoever is scaring and who gets scared. Then when you put it online its seems as though its to embarrass and that doesn’t sit right with me.
Did any of those kids look like they were having fun? At all? To YOU a scare is fun. IT IS NOT TO THEM.
At no point did they shake it off and laugh - they ALL ran to the people who made them scared for safety. Some of them were talking about how much they love their parents/mommy when they were the ones that scared them this way.
Your fun comes from watching THEM be afraid and that is psychotic.
Bro obviously that’s how you’d react at first that’s what jumpscares do 🙄 but i bet those kids laughed their asses off looking back at the videos especially after watching the adults laugh, they’ll understand that it’s silly. This is harmless, yall just a weak ass
Yeah theres a massive difference between being told fuckin ghost stories and seeing a ghost next to you while filming and not being old enough to comprehend its not real.
You got told a ghost story. These little kids just lived one. Big difference
It's 1. Posting the scare and 2. Using a phone to do it. Our kids are so sickly attached to devices and have no perception of the distinction between their devices and real life
This absolutely would've traumatized me as a kid. I had such an active imagination that I sufferred a lot of sleepless nights as a child thinking of all the horrible ghosts and things hiding around the house and that was just my own imagination I was dealing with.
God forbid any of these kids have genes that trigger mental illness later in life because if they end up getting schizophrenia or anything these types of figures will just keep showing up in their lives unless they get the right medication.
The fact that you're being downvoted seems to me like a sign that these people (downvoters) have no sympathy for anyone with experiences different from their own.
They probably have no idea that some people LITERALLY see figures that aren't there, hear sounds that aren't real, etc.
They just like to stay in their experience and ignore everyone else's.
yeah, i grew up on horror films and they never gave me ptsd, the older you get the funnier jump scares become, candyman scared me as an 8yr old I won't lie
Yep, some of them will have trauma to bathroom. Its all good that your parents plays prank on you, but doing it for Tiktok views, thats pretty messed up.
Did my parents film it and do it with the only intention of getting views online, or did they do it because they already knew I had fun being scared and they were there to pick me up?
Oh shut up, this is the problem now. Everything is trauma... That's part of the problem. Slot of people have some sort of trauma. Some people have real trauma. This kid isn't coming back from a tour of war is it.... Calm down.
Kids at that age are at critical development where events can have pretty lasting effects, events that shake trust in their foundation (i.e.: parents, home, safety). A parent who lovingly puts them in a bathroom, shuts the door (and some holding it closed) while they display both pretty freaky ghosts and won’t let them out risks a notable event yeah.
Some might have issues going to the bathroom, and not sure why. Some might have trust issues a lot later. Some might just move on and forget the whole thing. Some might hate that parent for a while. Some might overly attach to that parent who opened the door for a while (without realizing they caused it) too.
It’s a crapshoot on whether this will lead to something bad or at best nothing
The point is: why risk freaking negatively impacting your 8 year old child’s mental development for stupid likes?!
If they grow up to be 30 and still shit themselves at the thought of a terrible cutout ghost appearing on their phone then they didn’t stand a chance to begin with.
My god, not every bad/scary experience gives kids trauma. People have ruined that word and any actual weight it had. Now if this was happening every day to these kids at home, yeah that could Definitely be traumatic. But getting scared from a filter isnt gonna traumatize a child. Its like the 90s/00s car video jump scare. No one got traumatized lol
I have a childhood full of horrific stories but none of my CPTSD triggers have anything to do with the hundreds of violent altercations that I was involved in or witnessed, instead they are related to relatively minor but prolonged stressful situations. This wouldn’t have been something that bothered me as a kid but the concept of constantly being afraid of being exposed to this is on par with the actual things that caused the physiological imprints of trauma that have been difficult to exercise.
You people throw out the word "traumatized" so much it's lost all meaning. You're hurting people with real trauma because you've turned it into a joke.
533
u/A-Money-Lover 1d ago
well thats one way to traumatize your kids for life just for social media clout.