A Trauma Coach Is Begging Parents to Stop the Door-Close Scare Trend: “Stop Doing This to Kids”
Trauma coach Rachael Rogers is urging parents to stop filming scare pranks on toddlers, calling fear no joke. Viewers are split on where the line is.
The little boy does what he is asked. He looks at the camera and tells it how much he loves his mommy, and then, in the clip trauma coach Rachael Rogers played for her followers, the scare lands, he runs for the door, and the phone keeps filming. Rogers, in a white sweatshirt and a cap, watches it back, hand pressed to her temple, and she is not laughing.
Rogers, who posts as @theconsideratemomma to about 392,000 followers, is a certified parent coach and integrative trauma coach. Her reel, posted this week, takes aim at a resurgent prank trend in which parents scare toddlers, sometimes closing or holding a door as the child panics, and post the crying for views. Her caption carried the whole review in one line:
“I’ll never think this is funny.”
In the reel, Rogers says the child in the clip was set up, and she repeats one sentence like a warning:
“I know too much.”
Her argument, as she lays it out, is developmental. A young child’s logical, rational brain, she says, has barely begun to develop, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until about 25 to 28, and a toddler cannot tell what is real from what is fake, so the fright is experienced as real. She says the boy’s nervous system went into a flight response, that being filmed while humiliated makes it worse, and that telling a scared child nothing happened amounts, in her words, to gaslighting.
Where Viewers Drew the Line
Rogers also recites the pushback she says she always hears, that it is not that serious, it is not that deep, it is just a funny joke if you do not understand child development. Defenders of clips like these generally make that case: a seconds-long scare at home, a child comforted after, family humor nobody outside the house was meant to judge. Her closing point answers them directly:
“You do not use fear as a motivator or fear as a joke.”
She goes further, calling the pattern a form of emotional abuse when it is repeated in a home, while saying secure attachment never intentionally puts fear into a child. The comments sampled under the reel leaned heavily her way. One commenter, chezney, wrote:
“How awful, that poor boy. So glad you’ve covered this 🙌🏼”
Others thanked her for saying it and said they hated the trend, though the reel is one creator’s criticism, not a verdict on every family prank ever filmed.
Some viewers saw a harmless joke that ended in seconds, others saw a toddler’s worst moment posted for strangers.
The door closed either way, and viewers couldn’t agree on what it meant.
Hense Todd
Hense Todd covers the NFL Draft and college scouting for Chiefs Blitz. From Senior Bowl standouts to late-round sleepers, he tracks the prospects who could become the next Chiefs stars.
