What parent hasn’t frantically Googled at 3 am, searching for ways to make their baby stop crying?
Now, parents on social media are intentionally making their babies cry, and for what? Clicks, views, science?
The most bizarre thing may be how they’re doing it: by mooing at their babies.
How Did This Mooing Trend Even Start?
It’s entirely unclear why the trend of mooing at babies to make them cry began. Maybe some parent was going through a list of barnyard sounds to entertain their baby and noticed that mooing upset the infant every time, and upon sharing, learned that their friends’ babies did the same.
What is clear is that the trend has resurfaced multiple times over the years. If you’re following anything related to babies or parenting, you can expect to see the videos in your social media feeds because it’s hot again.
What Exactly Are Parents Doing, & How Are Babies Reacting?
Parents simply turn on the camera, focus on a happy baby, generally sitting up in front of them, and start making cow sounds. Sometimes, they’ll repeat the sound several times or stretch it out for a long while.
Some babies initially respond by looking startled and confused, but in most cases, they start crying, whether in response to the first moo or after a few tries. The compilation video below provides several examples.
Why Does This Make Babies Cry?
It doesn’t seem to affect all babies in the same way. There are videos where parents moo at their babies, and the response is laughter or apparent confusion. On the whole, most babies do respond with tears, though.
So, why?
There seems to be only one study on the matter, and unfortunately, while an abstract for it is available on ResearchGate, the full study is not. We’ve reached out to the authors to ask for a copy of the full text but have not yet received a response.
For that reason, we lack much information about how the study was carried out, including how many babies the experiment was tested on and what the age range was.
From the abstract, though, we can at least glean that the researchers concluded that mooing sounds like a baby’s cry, and hearing other babies cry is another sound that will often set off the waterworks.
They posit that hearing the sound can “remind” babies of their own crying, which makes them sad again.
The Babies Who Are The Exception To The Rule
Some babies react differently to parents mooing. A few laugh, or ignore it, or seem to wait patiently for their parents to start using words again.
When it was tried out with Science Baby on the Something Incredible YouTube channel, he didn’t cry, either.
The channel examined and dismissed some of the other theories that have been posited, including the notion that babies are disturbed by moo sounds because they’re unfamiliar. By contrast, babies don’t cry as reliably at other unfamiliar sounds.
Another theory concerned volume, but that’s also dismissed on the grounds that a baby’s ear canal amplifies high-pitched sounds, not deep ones like cows mooing.
An Alternate Theory Posited By A TikTok Mom
One mom on TikTok thinks that it’s simpler than any of this.
She points out that babies look to their parents to guide their emotional responses to the world. She says:
“Whenever we’re mooing, the sound in our voice is just almost like a monotone sound. It has no emotion, it has no inflection in it, and then also our stare. We’re probably doing kind of a blank stare, it has no emotion behind our eyes…basically whenever you moo at a baby, it makes them feel really uncertain and really unsafe.”
Fair enough — moo in a mirror and watch your own expression!
Can We Just Skip This Trend?
Honestly, parents are stressed enough, and growing up is already hard enough.
We don’t need to find extra tricks to make our babies cry unnecessarily. No, trying this trick out once probably does not scare our babies for life or traumatize them. They probably won’t develop a lifelong fear of cows or have nightmares about their parents turning into cows.
But really, it’s just better to make our babies happy, laugh, and smile instead of intentionally making them cry. So, maybe it’s better if we stick with other animal sounds at first and save the mooing for when our babies are a little older.
