From making her own baby wipes to letting her child ‘choose’ to tidy up, Sophie Morris puts TikTok parenting hacks to the test
If there’s one thing that unites the parents of a baby that doesn’t sleep, it is desperation. This is the only possible explanation for the unhinged lengths they’ll go to, from driving around for hours at night hoping the motion will send baby off, to hiring a sleep trainer or letting a child shout more (guilty).
So the news that exhausted parents are looking for sleep solutions on TikTok doesn’t surprise me. But the fact they’re looking to butter for salvation does feel like a new frontier.
The butter before bed “hack” took off when TikTok influencers began to post videos revealing that they were giving chunks of butter to their children before bedtime and now has many millions of views across the platform. The craze promises that butter helps infants sleep through the night, because the fat content fills up their tiny tummies and, bizarrely, that it stabilises their blood sugar.
Baby experts and nutritionists have warned that the butter hack is hokum. It could even be dangerous, some warned, because large amounts of butter contain too much fat and salt for young infants, and chunks of the slippery substance pose a choking risk.
What’s more, if you search for evidence, you’ll find just as many parents saying it didn’t work as those who swear by it.
But this is not the only left field parenting advice doing the rounds on TikTok. As the mother of an eight-year-old girl, Percy, I investigated some of the most popular hacks on the platform to see if any are actually useful.
MAKE HOMEMADE BABY WIPES Lisa Flom posts under the handle @ljflommom in an ongoing thread of “Things I wish I’d known as a first-time Mom”. I have an alternative title suggestion for Lisa, which is “Things I wish firsttime Moms knew to avoid”. Her ideas are mostly wacky as well as time-consuming or a waste of money. Her hack for attaching her baby to the sofa by fixing strips of
Velcro on to the baby’s clothes as well as the sofa, is amusing, but ruins both the clothes and the sofa.
Her homemade baby wipes are a prime example of a “hack” that is the opposite of helpful. Usually, homemade things do take longer, but we’re urged to do them because they’re cheaper or perhaps better for the environment, and bring our babies into less contact with potentially harmful chemicals.
Not so with Lisa Flom’s baby wipe hack. She boils up coconut oil, baby oil and baby lotion, then saws a kitchen roll in half and adds this to her pan. She generously bastes the kitchen roll with the oily liquid, then puts it in a freezer bag to use the clump of oily, melting rags as her bag of baby wipes. I’m relieved she’s got all those other products and kitchen rolls to clean her baby with instead of the pointless DIY wipes.
If you’ve ever used an entire packet of wet wipes to clear up poomageddon, you’ll wonder how Boomer parents coped with washable nappies and only buckets and cloths for clean-ups.
(Clue: they spent more time at home than in coffee shops or baby sensory.) But I’m afraid using fewer products and preparing to get your hands dirty is the only hack here.
I’M BORED When my daughter says, “I’m bored,” as she does many times most days, it doesn’t just make me see red. It makes me want to set fire to things.
I’m not sure she even understands what the word means, as she uses it to describe how she feels while enduring a 10-second wait for me to clear her first pudding and deliver her second.
Can TikTok’s “bestselling author and motivational speaker” Ty Allan Jackson help out? If your child says they’re bored, he suggests responding with: “Wow? that is awesome! What a wonderful opportunity for you to do something creative.”
I’m sorry, Ty, but this feels like parenting for dummies. As if any parent doesn’t have a series of suggestions up their sleeve for when a child claims boredom, with creative tasks such as drawing or making at the top of the list. Very often in our house, the issue is that we’ve already said no to choice number one, and that’s why Percy says she’s bored.
The next thing that Ty suggests is asking the child: “What is something you wish you knew how to do? That question will get them thinking and give you directions on how to entertain them,” he promises.
Right, so now we’re to offer a choice of literally any activity in the world? I swallow my doubt and try this on Percy the next time she says she’s bored. It turns out that Ty is right, she does have something she’d like to do instead of the all-day screen time she’s asking for. She would like us to open her a capybara sanctuary. This means setting up a rescue and rehoming centre for a giant rodent that is illegal to own as a pet in the UK.
THE SECRET TO TIDY-UP TIME Undeterred, I set about tackling the next tricky parenting task on my list, which is persuading my daughter that she is responsible for helping to clear up after herself (though I am here to assist). TikTok Mum @theconsideratemomma, a woman called Rachael, says if you want your child to do something, there’s a straightforward hack that will end with them happily compliant with your wishes - without any shouting or threats.
I can tell that Rachael has a gentle parenting approach. I’m all for gentle parenting, as long as it’s the kind that gives children boundaries and permits use of the word “no”, but I do consider, from my own experience, that it’s only a parenting style that you can pursue full time if you are also pursuing parenting full time.
For tidy-up time, her suggestion is that we ask the child questions related to the task, and get them to think critically about what’s happening. All children, she says, have some need for power or control, so let them make the decisions - or let them think they’ve made the decisions. Her example is getting them to help clear up by pointing out that if toys are left on the floor, the dog might eat them. The logic is that the child won’t want chewed toys and will happily clear up their own mess.
Unfortunately, my daughter is already one step ahead of me on this hack, as whenever I present something as an option, she laughs and points out that as I’ve given her the option, she’ll choose to say “no”. I try again with her beloved magazines, pointing out that if she leaves her Beano and Phoenix comics all over the kitchen table, they might end up with food on them. “That’s OK,” she says, walking away.
Overall, I find the TikTok parenting hacks entertaining but not especially useful. It feels like the so-called experts are busy shilling advice on how to parent harder, better, faster, stronger so that we can all get it over and done with in record time, and move on to creating a new meme.
In the end, I find the most useful tip on LADbible, in a clip where the mum is relaxing in bed. “Don’t come in, I’m wrapping presents,” she calls to the child at the door, securing herself all the solo time she needs without a single cry of “I’m bored”.