“Mommy, Mommy, do you want to see me dance?” my 7-year-old excitedly asks me. I nod and smile as she asks Alexa to play a song. She’s donning a half shirt that exposes her entire belly – an accidental purchase she’s thrilled to be sporting since she’s never allowed to wear it. Her huge, wild mane of red, curly hair surrounds her angelic, porcelain face. The music starts and so does she. Her body is up, down, moving fast, then slow. Her expressions are changing just as fast as her body movements. She looks surprised then shocked. There’s an artificiality in her varying smiles. She’s shaking her hips and half-mouthing the lyrics - which are becoming more explicit as the song goes on. When I recognize some moves from her dance class, I see glimpses of my little girl but it’s fleeting. I realize…she’s not dancing. She’s performing. When she’s finished, my outside voice tells her, “Wow, that was so…good.” while my inside voice asks, “What the hell was that?”
So cute…not.
I was first introduced to TikTok by my 11-year old daughter months ago when she showed me a funny lip sync video that her friends had made and sent to her. It was cute and innocent. At the same time, I’d heard stories about the misuse of this particular app and how it was causing problems among kids everywhere. My husband, wanting me to be more aware of the insidious nature of it, showed the app to me in more depth. The videos ranged from dumb to highly inappropriate, particularly for a child of any of our kids’ ages. After watching some of it, I quickly dismissed the app as “gross” and was thankful our 11-year-old wasn’t asking us to download it.
Dancing Like No One’s Watching
Since then, I began noticing kids doing TikTok dances at swim meets and in stores. Basically, if there was a gathering of kids, there would inevitably be a TikTok dance happening at some point too. There wasn’t necessarily any music playing, which looked a bit odd to me at first. Kids would TikTok solo too. These sudden and spastic dance moves that would make TikTok into the cultural phenomenon that it is appeared so often in everyday life that it became as ordinary as a kid nibbling on her nails. The kids didn’t care about the fact that there was no music playing or that they were in public when they TikTok’ed. And I kind of loved that about it. We live in such a fast-paced, pressure-filled, image-obsessed, hurry-up/grow-up world and when the kids were goofing off doing their TikToks, I loved that they looked like, well…kids.
In recent weeks, during our long, uneventful stint at home due to the coronavirus, my girls decided to teach me a TikTok dance. It was, surprisingly, a lot more fun and challenging than I thought it would be. While they taught me the dance (which ended up taking less than a minute to do but hours to learn), we laughed and laughed. It took more physical skill than I had expected, and worked things like hand-eye coordination, and muscle memory. After learning my first TikTok, I was giddy with accomplishment. I looked like a complete buffoon, but I got it done. I hadn’t worked out in a while and decided to count this as exercise. Winning. At the same time, I was amusing my kids. Winning again. I wanted to learn another one.
Research Findings
So, one night, unable to sleep, I reached for my phone and decided I’d surprise my kids by teaching myself another dance. Since I didn’t have the app, I started scrolling through TikTok dances on YouTube. In my quest to find the simplest one, I watched, for the first time, a lot of videos. The kids in them ranged in age from about 11 to 25. They made the dances look so easy, but for this 44-year-old mom, they were not. I unexpectedly found myself in awe of and impressed by these youngins. Like most social media apps and the internet in general, there was a lot of garbage amidst the gold. As I watched dance video after dance video, I was simultaneously delighted and disgusted. The girls and women dancing – almost every single one – had some portion of their torsos showing, from just a strip of skin to their entire stomachs. The dances were short, and many were suggestive. The girls and women of TikTok were beyond sexy. Their moves - specifically designed to entice. The longer I watched, it felt less and less like people were dancing for themselves, and more and more like they were dancing for someone else. It didn’t feel like there was any kind of authentic fun happening. It felt staged, phony and airbrushed. And as I watched, I had this totally surreal epiphany. They reminded me of someone. My brain flashed to my 7-year-old daughter. Oh. OH! Ohhhhh. This is who she is imitating. This is why, every time she dances for me lately, she looks like she’s dancing for dollars. Holy Crap. Has she been watching these videos!?! But, wait, my kids don’t even have the app. (I know it sounds ridiculous, but it never even occurred to me that my littlest would be watching these videos by simply searching for them through the internet on the family iPad or my phone, just like I had done.) Oops. Gulp. Cue the guilt.
Inappropriate but…
So, what’s a mom to do? Ban TikTok? But we were having so much fun! My 9-year-old son who was doing more observing than participating even joined in on learning our most recent dance. I watched as his big sister taught it to him. He listened patiently as she encouraged him. He got it down in just a few minutes (damn, these kids learn fast) and in that simple act of learning the dance, I saw him try and fail at something and keep trying and failing until he succeeded. And to witness that little glimmer of excitement and pride in his eyes as he gained mastery over something, well, my heart did a little dance of its own.
I’ve decided that many of the dance videos on TikTok aren’t appropriate for any of my kids but that doesn’t mean we can’t still watch some of the tutorial videos together and have discussions about them. If they want to watch some dances, I can make sure they are watching the “clean” ones that omit the explicit lyrics. I can also make sure they’re watching the ones that are done by kids closer to their age rather than the ones that are intentionally crafted for the male gaze. We can discuss which dances they like best and why. We can talk about the message(s) the dances and the songs might be sending about what it means to be female and male. We can discuss whether the dances on this platform are like the dances my girls are learning in their classes and how they are the same or different. We can talk about whether the people they know and love look like the people on the app and why or why not they think that is. The media our kids consume undoubtedly has the power to shape their malleable little minds as well as ours. Our intake of it matters and its impact on our feelings of happiness and self-worth shouldn’t be minimized. TikTok transformed my little girl into a provocative young adult and her grown-arse mother into a carefree child. It’s also taught me a thing or too, mainly that I have no short-term memory. But, it also taught me to pay attention, to respect the seemingly “stupid” apps that my kids like, and to help them look at things with a critical eye rather than a judgmental one. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring but by God, I know that today, there will be dancing.