When Alissa Torrez, 24, saw TikTok videos of parents doing the viral “cookie challenge” with their toddlers, she immediately wanted to hop on the trend with her 3-year-old son, Oliver.
In these lighthearted videos, parents test their children’s sharing skills through a simple exercise that goes something like this: They sit on either side of their toddler and present three covered plates, each with a “surprise.” (Hint: It’s cookies.)
On the count of three, each person reveals what’s on their plate. One parent has a single cookie, the child has two and the other parent has nothing. The adults then wait to see if their child decides to give their extra cookie to the parent without one, who often pouts or sighs to express disappointment and nudge them in the right direction.
“I was thinking to myself ‘Oh, I have to do this with Oliver because he’s such an empathetic little kid,’” Ms. Torrez said, adding that “I was just like, ‘I’m sure he’s going to do something really sweet.’”
And, indeed, Oliver gasped once he realized there was no M&M cookie under his mother’s paper towel and immediately came to the rescue.
“Hey, it’s OK!” Oliver said in the video, which now has more than 48 million views. He quickly gave his second cookie to his mother, and covered up each cookie with a paper towel so that everyone could experience the grand reveal.
“My heart was so warm,” Ms. Torrez said. “I was pretty proud.”
When MoNique Kirkland did the challenge with her 1-year-old daughter Luna-Ray (using powdered sugar cookies with a raspberry filling), she wasn’t quite so lucky.
“At this age they don’t really understand sharing,” Mrs. Kirkland said, noting that the cookie is a family favorite. “She would let me starve,” she added with a laugh. (In a follow-up interview, however, Mrs. Kirkland said that Luna-Ray was “happy to share” when asked directly.)
While the “cookie challenge” hashtag has parents both celebrating and lamenting their toddlers’ manners, it’s nothing more than an amusing exercise, experts said.
The challenge is not an accurate way to draw conclusions about a child’s willingness to share, their sense of empathy, or their social or emotional development at large, said Tovah Klein, the director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development.
“This is not a scientific experiment,” Dr. Klein said, “and so I think parents want to be cautious about generalizing anything other than that this is a fun, funny moment.”
Sharing is an example of what experts call “prosocial behavior,” which refers to voluntary actions intended to benefit other people. Research suggests that children begin to demonstrate prosocial behaviors like sharing and helping others during infancy. But they may not fully understand the feelings of other people, or how their own actions impact others, until later in childhood — when their cognitive abilities have matured and they’ve had more experience interacting with peers in settings such as day care and preschool, Dr. Klein said.
“Generosity develops over time,” she added.
Fully understanding a child’s ability to share would require observing patterns in their behavior across a variety of situations, Dr. Klein said. The cookie challenge, by contrast, is just “a snapshot of a moment in time,” said Claire Dunphy, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
And a child’s decision to keep or share a cookie can be influenced by a range of factors such as how hungry they were, how well they slept the night before or simply their mood at the time, Dr. Dunphy said.
The bottom line? Take the results of the cookie challenge with a grain of salt.
Katie Mogg is a reporter covering health and wellness and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Katie Mogg
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