When it comes to spotting trends, there’s no better place than TikTok (sorry, Instagram Reels). Our algorithms are full of viral recipes, dance challenges, and ridiculous morning routines—but we will always have a soft spot for kid content.
Seeing babies go to hibachi for the first time? Incredible. Keeping up with a toddler’s adorable OOTDs? Precious. Watching every single episode of Recess Therapy? We’ve been there. But one new viral trend is prompting some controversial takes: the cookie challenge.
Let’s break down how the challenge works. Parents present plates meant for both themselves and their children, giving the kids two cookies and leaving one of the parent’s plates empty. Then, the adults drop some not-so-subtle hints and wait to see if their kids will offer up one of their extra cookies.
The results are mixed. Some adorably generous kids immediately share their snacks, but the real entertainment comes from the cookie hoarders. One family’s attempt at the kid’s cookie challenge racked up a whopping 44 million views in just five days.
TikTok users are understandably entertained by the trend. One commenter on the above video wrote, “She’s so unbothered I’m crying.” Another added, “The fake aww 😂😂😂 she tore them cookies up no remorse.”
But, because it’s the internet, plenty of unhinged commenters are taking the challenge way too seriously. “It seems like a wake-up call that someone needs to teach them about sharing and about selfish behavior,” one user wrote.
Some TikTok users have taken the conversation to a whole other level, suggesting that kids who don’t share their cookies show early signs of narcissistic personality disorder.
But according to child and family therapist Maria Evans, it’s not that deep. In a video posted to TikTok, she broke down why the cookie challenge isn’t a fair gauge of a child’s personality. “It doesn’t measure generosity. It measures, if anything, how well kids pick up on random cues,” Evans says. “If your toddler didn’t share during this game, that’s developmentally normal.”
It takes several years of social development for children to fully understand the concept of sharing. Evans even says that the entire challenge is rigged because the premise isn’t familiar to them.
“Kids don’t think to share because in their world, you [the parent] never eat the treats,” she explains. “Think of how often you hand your child a cookie without taking one yourself. They’re not selfish, they’re just doing what they’ve seen.”
And on top of that, let’s be honest: we can’t assess a child’s moral compass through a 60-second TikTok. And even if we could… should we? Let’s keep the challenge light and fun, y’all.
Expertise: TikTok Trends, Drinks, Pop Culture
Education: B.A. in Journalism and B.S. in Communications from NYU, Culinary Arts degree from The Institute of Culinary Education
About Me: As an associate editor at Delish, Gabby works on everything from features to recipes to content on our social media channels. Before joining the team, she wrote for StarChefs Rising Stars Magazine, Mashed, and Food52. When she’s not developing cocktail recipes, she’s making cocktail-inspired dishes like Dirty Martini Pasta and Aperol Spritz Trifle. Her features cover online trends like the Millennial Shopping Cart, rank everything from hard seltzers to frozen French fries, and answer some of your most pressing food safety questions. You can also find her posting content on Delish’s TikTok, including her three-part series about cooking like influencer Nara Smith that garnered over 3M combined views. She loves eating spicy food, collecting cookbooks, and adding a mountain of Parmesan to any dish she can.
