Anyone who has been around kids for any length of time knows that kids can be super funny. They are natural comedians and can be so fun to joke around with and even play mild pranks on because they love the attention and laughter, too. By pranks, we don't mean the Jimmy Kimmel style of "parents stole the Halloween candy" pranks, those are just plain mean. While kids can be so funny to joke around with, it is really upsetting when parents make their unknowing kids the butt of a vulgar joke, as one dad in Australia recently did.
A TikTok mom named Sarah, posting under the handle @mom.uncharted, recently called out a father who posted a video of his 2-year-old daughter wearing a baseball cap that he had altered to have an obscene word prominently displayed on it.
We won't print the word, but we will "see you next Tuesday," and most readers will catch our drift. The father explained in the video that the hat was a gift to his daughter after he and his son got cute matching baseball caps with their names printed on them.
So, the son gets a personalized hat with his name and the girl gets a hat with a vulgar slang term for a vagina on it? Sometimes we really do hate the internet. We aren't the only ones who think this is gross and Sarah wasn't afraid to call him out.
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She calls him a 'garbage parent' and we can't disagree.
Sarah explains that the first thing that is upsetting is that this dad has a son, whom he "is supposed to be teaching how to respect women," and yet he is publicly making his 2-year-old daughter the butt of a joke that's based in sexual overtones. We agree with Sarah that this is "awful."
Sarah also points out that he is basically making his daughter the target of a joke just to get a "disappointing and pathetic" dopamine hit from the likes and views that the video got. As she points out in the caption, this stupid joke is now part of this innocent child's digital footprint. Nothing on the internet ever goes away, so someday she'll likely see that her dad was happy to label her a vulgar word so that strangers could get a cheap laugh.
Not laughing were other moms who remarked: "This actually makes me want to cry. I would leave my husband if he did that to our daughter."
Some people tried to defend him, saying that it was just Australian slang.
Some Australians (and non-Aussies too) tried to claim that this wasn't as bad as it seemed because the word in question is considered less obscene in Australia. One noted that "Aussies use the C word in a joking way, not the same as US where its an insult" and another claimed it could be considered just a "cultural difference."
Sarah wasn't having it, and clapped back with a video explaining that, even if the word is used differently there, it still isn't a word that people apply to children. She argues that "this father, I'm going to make the assumption, knows that the term is something vastly different in many countries throughout the world. And this is a world wide app."
A few other folks argued that it "isn't that deep," but Sarah points out that it actually is when kids are involved and can't give consent to being included in the joke or having their image shared online.
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'Garbage Dad' responded and tried to defend himself.
The dad, who has since deleted his TikTok account, tried to defend himself for making the joke but other videos showed that this isn't the only time he's made cruel jokes at the expense of his kids. Another TikTok user posted a video that shows the dad claiming he just bought $300 worth of "bath toys" for his kids.
He opens the bag and shows a toaster and a hairdryer. Ah, yes, the absolutely hysterical idea of children being killed in the bathtub. Hard to claim that is just an example of Australian humor, isn't it?
He's just a bully.
Let's be super clear here. Laughing with kids: fine! Laughing at kids when they do something silly: also fine! Making kids the butt of a joke about death or sexual organs: NOT COOL, MAN.
The word that came to mind for a lot of people who watched the video is "bully," with several people pointing out just how harmful it is for a child's first bully to be their own parent.
Australian slang or obscene word, it doesn't matter. We're pretty confident that Bandit and Chilli, in the words of one commentor, "would NEVER."
