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Key points
- #eggchallenge hinders several crucial psychological functions and can interfere with a child's attachment.
- Attunement underlies attachment and fuels our ability to learn.
- When we introduce stress into a situation that should have been safe, our children develop hypervigilance.
- Cycle-breaking means committing to providing a secure childhood, even if we didn't experience it ourselves.
The toddler leans over the bowl, excitedly watching her mom. OK, we’re gonna bake cookies. See, this is how you add the sugar… The toddler wriggles with excitement. Suddenly, Mom picks up an egg and cracks it on the toddler’s head. She jumps and bursts into tears. Mom cracks up and winks into the camera.
There are a lot of goals to reach when we’re parenting. How much time do we spend with kids? How much screen time do we allow? Are we serving them healthy food? Are we responsive enough? It feels like there are so many ways to fail as a parent because the ceiling is so high. We could always be doing more, providing a better life, modeling self-regulation skills—the ways to improve our parenting are endless. As Post-Traumatic Parents, we’re always questioning ourselves, worried that our damage will damage them. (To read more about Post-Traumatic Parenting, click here.)
But there’s another way to improve parenting, and that’s to avoid the “floors” of parenting, the behaviors that seem innocuous on the surface but can leave a lasting impact.
Welcome to the egg crack challenge, where parents crack an egg on a toddler’s head, filming the reaction to post on TikTok. I’ve heard so many reactions to these pranks—people who feel the concern from child psychologists like me is overdone, that it’s “just a joke,” and that the child eventually “gets it.”
How Attunement Sets Us Up for Attachment and Learning
Let’s explore what happens in a toddler's brain when they're learning from us and whether this is a risk we want to take.
I’m outside with Mommy and there’s white stuff falling from the sky. It’s cold. Is that dangerous? Mommy says “Snow, Jack! That’s snow. It’s cold, right? Oh, you're scared? It’s OK. Mommy’s here. Look, you can play with snow…” Mommy leans over and traces a line. My tummy feels better. I’m not scared anymore. Mommy taught me something new. I know a new concept—snow—and that it’s not dangerous.
A child’s brain is primed to learn from the parent. After all, it’s Mom or Dad who tells me how the world works. Mom explains things like “bugs,” or “snow,” or “bleeding.” She helps me understand body sensations by modeling a reaction to me (“Oh, your diaper is wet and you’re so sad…It’s OK. We will fix it. All better now.) She provides me with a vocabulary and cognitive understanding of myself, the world, and how things work. She also helps me sort out my emotional reactions, my bodily sensations, and my sense of self.
Jean Piaget, originator of cognitive psychology, might call this learning from a “more knowledgeable other.” Mom knows this world and can teach me what I need to know. So, while I’m learning this new thing called “baking with Mom”—my brain is super open. I’m engaged in the task, focused, and experiencing curiosity and wonder. It’s not just baking that I’m learning. I’m learning how to learn from a more knowledgeable other, like a teacher, an older kid, or a parent.
In attachment research, we call that “attunement.” It’s when two brains are on the same wavelength, sharing a good experience. It’s what learning should feel like—and does feel like—when we’re fully open to it.
All of a sudden, an egg is cracked on the child’s head, and Mom cracks up and winks into the camera.
What happens? The child’s brain switches out of attuned learning mode and into hypervigilant stress mode. If you watch a couple of these videos, you can see several stress responses. There are the kids who fight—they yell, hit, or throw something. There are the kids who flee in terror. And then there are the most heartbreaking children, the ones who shut down, who burst into tears, or freeze. Polyvagal theory explains why different kids have different types of stress responses, but one thing all of these children have in common is that stress has been introduced to a situation that should have been safe.
What have we done?
We’ve just taught this child not to enter that attuned learning phase too easily, to remain hypervigilant, lest delight turn into terror in one second. How is this child supposed to go to school and learn from more knowledgeable teachers, peers, and older children? After all, that sense of attunement, fascination, and interest has now been encoded by the brain as "dangerous."
I’ve had teachers ask me about confusing kids—the ones who seemed engaged in a lesson or who have a good relationship with the teacher—who suddenly become disruptive or shut down, seemingly at a time when things are going well. I must wonder—what does this child’s brain equate “things going well” with? Does the rug get swept out from under them at home just when things seem to be going well?
My First Experience of Bullying
As the parent laughs into the camera, the child begins to feel naïve, vulnerable, and foolish. After all, if they knew more about the world, they wouldn’t have been tricked. This creates a mindset where vulnerability is dangerous, and innocence is something to shed. Do we really want to raise children who are actively trying to become cynical and hard-edged as protection against us? Do we want to be their first bullies?
Tina Payne Bryson, co-author of the book Showing Up, poetically says: You can’t be the safe harbor if you’re also the storm. A parent is meant to be the safe harbor, the person who shields us from bullies, the person who helps us make sense of the inevitable cruelties of life. But if the parent is also the perpetrator of those cruelties, even minor ones, what happens to the developing personality? Remember, our attachment to our parents is what teaches us how to navigate this world, and the building block of attachment is attunement. So many things interfere with attunement—our own stresses at work, our phones, our children’s lives and preoccupations—do we really want to introduce an extra one?
Those Pranks Were Done to Me, and I’m Fine
Identification with an aggressor is a defense mechanism first described by ego psychologist Anna Freud. Sometimes, we identify with an aggressor as a way to help us make sense of being bullied or traumatized. We take on the attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics of a powerful person who bullied us. This allows us to feel like what happened was “OK” and like the world is a safe and predictable place again.
Identification with an aggressor explains how we can sometimes engage in parental ventriloquism, saying the exact things to our kids that we hated to hear from our parents. We take some of that in as just “how parents talk” or “what parents do” until we decide that we’re going to actively break that cycle.
So, your parents did it to you, and you’re just fine?
You can be fine. You can think hard about attunement, attachment, and breaking these cycles.
But are you sure you're fine?
Well, you’re someone who would crack an egg on a little kid’s head, laugh at them, and then post that on the internet.
Sorry, but that’s just not fine.
References
Siegel D. J. & Bryson T. P. (2020). The power of showing up : how parental presence shapes who our kids become and how their brains get wired (First). Ballantine Books.
Freud, A. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. Revised edition, The Writings of Anna Freud, 2.
