Cringe Ass Nae Nae Baby Meme And Digital Privacy

I was sitting in our local coffee shop back in 2018, wearing this horrifying mustard yellow sweater that I genuinely thought made me look like a cool Brooklyn creative but actually just made me look jaundiced. It was raining outside—that gross, sideways November sleet—and my two-year-old daughter, Maya, was currently smearing a horrifying amount of spaghetti sauce onto the knee of my favorite Zara jeans. I definitely shouldn't have worn light denim around a toddler, but I was sleep-deprived and not making great choices. So naturally, instead of stopping her, I pulled out my phone. I snapped a picture of her mid-tantrum, sauce everywhere, face red and furious. I thought it was hilarious. I slapped a witty caption on it about "mom life" and posted it to my completely public Instagram account for my thousand-something followers to see.

My husband Greg looked up from his lukewarm black coffee, sighed, and asked if I really needed to broadcast her meltdown to the entire world. I rolled my eyes and told him he just didn't get it, that moms need to be relatable, that it was fine.

I was so, so wrong. But it took a bizarre, totally nonsensical internet joke years later to finally make me realize what a massive mistake I was making.

The sticky iPad incident

Fast forward to last week. We were at a family barbecue, and Maya—who's now seven and entirely too observant—was huddled in the corner watching something on her thirteen-year-old cousin’s incredibly sticky iPad. I was trying to eat a hot dog in peace when I heard Maya ask, loud and clear, what a "cringe dancing nae nae infant" was. She used the actual bad word, but you get the point. I almost choked on my bun. I spilled half my diet soda down my shirt.

LIKE WHAT.

I marched over there, convinced my teenager nephew was showing her something wildly inappropriate. He rolled his eyes with that classic Gen Z superiority and showed me the screen. It was a meme. A really, really weird internet meme. If you aren't familiar with this deeply cursed corner of the internet, let me try to explain it without sounding like a crazy person. Basically, years ago, someone posted a totally innocent photo of a real-life toddler doing a hip-hop dance. Just a normal, probably private family moment. But the internet got hold of it. Random teenagers on Reddit put these gross, distorted, red "deep-fried" filters over the kid's face, slapped awful text on it, and invented this massive, morbid fake backstory where they claimed the toddler was some notorious criminal who died in a 2004 shootout.

I mean, what the actual hell?

It’s used as this ironic, dark joke among kids now, but staring at that warped image on the iPad, all I felt was cold dread. That was a real kid. Some mom somewhere thought she was just sharing a cute video of her child dancing with her friends, and somehow it got hijacked by millions of strangers and turned into a grotesque, immortal internet joke. The kid is probably in high school now, walking around knowing that his face is universally recognized as the internet's weirdest punchline.

My pediatrician's terrifying rant

It hit me like a ton of bricks right then and there. I grabbed Maya, handed the sticky iPad back to my nephew, and went home to mass-delete hundreds of photos.

A few days later, I brought this up during Leo’s four-year well-visit. My pediatrician, Dr. Aris, is this wonderfully grumpy older guy who I absolutely adore. He was checking Leo's ears while Leo was actively trying to eat a crinkly paper medical gown, and I blurted out the whole story about the meme and the iPad. Dr. Aris didn't even look surprised. He mumbled something about how the American Academy of Pediatrics has been screaming about digital footprints for years, and how once an image hits a server, parents basically forfeit all legal rights to how it's used or manipulated by weirdos online.

He said teenagers are developing severe psychological anxiety when they realize their entire childhood has been commodified or mocked online without their consent. I'm probably butchering his exact medical phrasing because I was busy wrestling a tongue depressor away from Leo, but the panic it instilled in me was extremely real. We're raising an entire generation where the aesthetic 'e baby' culture means their lives are documented for public consumption before they even exit the womb. It's terrifying. Seriously.

Let’s talk about extended family for a second because holy hell. I love my mother-in-law. I really do. But if she posts one more bathtub picture of Leo to her public Facebook wall with zero privacy settings, I'm going to lose my actual mind. I’ve had to have the "please take that down immediately" conversation with her at least three times, and every single time she acts like I’m accusing her of a war crime. She’ll cry, she’ll say she just wants to show off her beautiful grandson to her ladies’ golf group, and I end up feeling like the wicked witch of the west. But I don't care anymore. After seeing what happens to innocent photos online, I refuse to budge. It’s a whole exhausting thing that usually ends with Greg having to intervene while I aggressively fold laundry. Putting emojis over your kid's face in photos? Kinda weird looking but honestly whatever works.

Finding ways to just exist offline

So our new house rule is that we exist offline as much as humanly possible. No screens for the kids, no public posts for the parents. When Leo was cutting his molars last month, he was an absolute nightmare—screaming, drooling everywhere, just miserable. The old me would have posted a tired-mom selfie with him crying in the background. The new me just sat on the floor with him and tried to survive.

I'll say, if you're in the thick of the teething trenches and trying to keep your kid distracted without putting them in front of a tablet, we got this Bear Teething Rattle from Kianao and it genuinely saved my sanity. It’s this little handmade crochet bear on an untreated beechwood ring. Leo just gnawed aggressively on the wooden part for hours while I drank cold coffee and stared at the wall. It’s soft, it doesn't have any weird chemicals, and honestly, the little blue bear is cute enough that I didn't mind tripping over it in the hallway. It gave us both some blessed quiet time that wasn't recorded for the internet.

I also bought their Blue Fox Bamboo Baby Blanket for his crib because I read that blue tones help babies sleep and I'm susceptible to any sleep-related marketing. Look, it’s nice. It’s incredibly soft and the bamboo blend is supposed to be breathable or whatever. But honestly? It's just okay for us because Leo immediately dragged it through a massive mud puddle at the park, and I'm terrible at laundry, so the beautiful Scandinavian fox pattern is now permanently stained brown in the corner. My fault for taking a nice sleep blanket outside, obviously, but I'm too lazy to soak it.

My entirely unscientific rules for internet safety

Since I had to learn everything the hard way, we had to drastically change how we operate in this house. If you're starting to freak out about your own camera roll, here's what we do now:

The zero face rule. I just don't post their faces to social media anymore. Period. If I feel the desperate need to post my kid, it's the back of Maya's head while she's looking at a bug, or just Leo's chubby little hands holding a strawberry.
Group chats only. If Maya loses a tooth and looks adorable and gap-toothed, that photo goes directly into the private family iMessage group. Not on the grid. Not on stories.
Audit the followers. I went through my Instagram and ruthlessly blocked anyone I haven't spoken to in the last two years. If you didn't come to my wedding or haven't bought me a coffee recently, you don't get to consume my family's life as content.

It's honestly so freeing. You don't realize how much of your parenting is performative until you strip away the audience. Before you fall down the rabbit hole of buying smart-screens to entertain your kids so you can scroll in peace, maybe just look at some simple wooden play gyms instead and let them figure out how to be bored.

For quiet time, we rely heavily on physical toys now. We got the Gentle Baby Building Block Set because I was so incredibly sick of stepping on sharp plastic bricks that I wanted to cry. These are soft rubber, they've little animal symbols on them, and the kids can just stack them and knock them over for twenty minutes without any flashing lights or Wi-Fi connections required. They even throw them in the bathtub. It’s just simple, tactile play.

Anyway, the point is, I never want my kids to grow up and find out that their worst, most embarrassing, or even their most innocent childhood moments were served up on a silver platter for strangers to laugh at. I don't want Maya to ever feel like she's just an extension of my personal brand. Instead of constantly stressing over who's saving your photos and trying to enforce boundaries with relatives who just don't get it, maybe just delete the apps from your home screen for a weekend and get down on the floor to play blocks with your toddler until your knees hurt.

If you want to keep your kids busy with actual, physical things instead of screens, go check out Kianao’s collection of sustainable toys and just unplug for the afternoon.

Questions I usually get about this internet privacy stuff

What actually is that weird dancing meme?
Oh god, it's just a regular, harmless photo of a toddler from around 2018 doing a silly hip-hop dance. But the internet is an awful place, so people got hold of it, put gross deep-fried visual filters on it, and made up these dark, fake stories about the kid being in a shootout. It's basically the ultimate proof that the internet will ruin anything innocent if you give it the chance.

Do you still use Instagram at all?
I do, I'm not completely off the grid! I just lock it down tight. I've a private account with a very small handful of people who I actually see in real life. But even then, I rarely post the kids' faces. I mostly just post pictures of the weird things my husband builds in the garage or my coffee.

How do you handle grandparents who won't stop posting photos?
Really badly, at first. Greg had to be the one to tell his parents to stop because I was too anxious to do it. Now we just have a strict rule: if they break the privacy boundary and post a photo without asking, they don't get any new photos of the kids texted to them for a month. I'm petty like that, but it honestly worked.

Is it too late if I've already posted my kids for years?
No! I literally went back and mass-deleted like three years of Maya's life from my old public grids. Sure, my pediatrician mentioned that someone might have saved them somewhere in the void, but taking them down now makes me feel like I took some control back. It's never too late to just stop.