Parents Are Pretending to Smear Poop on Their Kids on TikTok

Over the past year and change, parents on TikTok have been pranking/tormenting their children by smearing peanut butter or Nutella or chocolate pudding on their kids’ arms and telling them it’s poop, then filming their reaction in hopes of turning the child’s freakout into internet virality. Most victims of the #poopchallenge are horrified, but some babies are harder to prank than you’d think.

The prank goes like this: A parent is pretending to poop in the bathroom, but they ask their kid to hand them the toilet paper because it’s on the counter. In the process, they smear something on their kid’s arm—peanut butter, Nutella, chocolate sauce, whatever is brown in color and a poop-like consistency. The children assume it’s poop and usually freak out.

I don’t think children screaming and crying is especially funny, but sometimes the children react in curious ways. Take this one child who, upon hearing that his arm is covered in poop, keeps touching and playing with it as he begins to scream.

In this TikTok, as the child carefully protects her adorable hoodie from the alleged poop on her hand, the family’s dog just idly licks it up from the ground—it was Nutella.

Another person tried this prank on their grandmother, who was nonplussed by the affair.

Most impressive to me is this toddler who immediately saw through the entire ruse after realizing that whatever was on her arm wasn’t stinky like poop is. Children: Yhey are our future.

It’s normal(ish) for parents to play harmless pranks on their kids. It’s less normal for parents to share footage of them screaming to, potentially, millions of people. When my own mother told me that baseballs were made of very long worms, rolled up into a ball, I believed her, because I was nine and I trusted my mom to not just tell me a lie for fun. At least at that time I could only embarrass myself by repeating this to my fourth-grade class. If I were a child now, it might have ended up being the #wormchallenge.