Toxic Internet Trends: What Parents Must Know About Baby Stickley

"Keep them off screens entirely until they're eighteen," my mum told me last Sunday over a lukewarm cup of tea, eyeing my smartphone like it was an unexploded bomb waiting to detonate in the living room. "Just stick the parental locks on everything and hope for the best, mate," advised my neighbor Dave, who once managed to lock himself out of his own smart television for three consecutive months. Then there was the very smug parenting author on a podcast I subjected myself to recently, who suggested that granting toddlers completely unrestricted internet access builds "digital resilience and innate boundary setting."

I've two-year-old twin girls. Their current form of digital resilience involves trying to physically post the television remote into the nappy bin because they think it's funny when I sigh heavily. We're a long way off from them having unsupervised access to the wilds of the internet, but as a former journalist who spends entirely too much time reading while hiding in the bathroom, I recently fell down a rabbit hole trying to understand what awaits us in a decade.

I was ostensibly trying to read up on algorithmic safety, but instead, I stumbled headfirst into a bizarre, deeply unsettling online subculture. It revolves around a twenty-year-old internet personality known by a highly deceptive pseudonym—an alias so harmless-sounding that a sleep-deprived parent might accidentally mistake it for a nursery rhyme character or a brand of organic porridge. This whole baby stickley internet phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with infants, and everything to do with teenage boys trying to violently restructure their own faces.

My descent into the strange world of jawline obsession

If you aren't familiar with "looksmaxxing," I envy your peaceful, uncluttered mind. As far as my tired brain can comprehend, it's a trend where young men and teenage boys attempt to maximize their physical appearance to become hyper-masculine caricatures of themselves. We aren't talking about putting on a bit of aftershave and combing their hair here. They're selling each other courses—like the so-called stickley method—that promote extreme, borderline medieval tactics to alter their bone structure.

The one that genuinely made me drop my digestive biscuit into my tea is something called "thumb-pulling." Apparently, young lads are being instructed to put their thumbs into their own mouths and pull violently forward on the roof of their palates. The theory, peddled by teenagers on TikTok who possess all the medical qualifications of a household potted plant, is that this will shift their maxilla bone forward and give them a stronger jawline.

I spent three paragraphs' worth of mental energy just trying to process the absolute absurdity of this. You have boys quite literally trying to pull their own skulls apart from the inside out because an algorithm told them their chin was too soft. I watched a video of a teenager casually discussing how much it hurt to wrench his own upper palate daily, treating it like a completely normal Tuesday afternoon hobby rather than an act of aggressive self-harm. The sheer desperation of it, the incredible pressure these kids must feel to resort to essentially DIY orthodontic torture, is staggering. You want to reach through the screen, hand them a cup of squash, and tell them to go outside and kick a football at a wall.

I don't even want to know what they're doing with the other trend called "bone smashing," to be perfectly honest.

When actual teething is right in front of you

The big irony of reading about teenagers aggressively manipulating their own mouths is that I'm currently watching two toddlers do it naturally, albeit for completely different reasons. My girls are cutting their two-year molars, which means our flat constantly echoes with the sound of grizzling, drool-soaked misery.

Unlike the lads on the internet, my daughters aren't worried about their profiles; they just want the dull throb in their gums to stop. I recently bought the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy out of sheer desperation at 3 am, and it has become the most fiercely guarded object in our home. Twin A has claimed it as her personal emotional support panda. She wanders around the flat gnawing aggressively on its little silicone ears, leaving a trail of saliva in her wake. I genuinely love this thing. It's flat enough that she can hold it without dropping it every five seconds (which usually results in a full-scale meltdown), and I can just chuck it in the dishwasher when it inevitably gets dropped in a puddle of something unidentifiable in the kitchen. It provides safe, normal resistance for a developing mouth, which is a stark contrast to what the internet is telling older kids to do.

I also picked up the Gentle Baby Building Block Set while I was at it. They're perfectly fine. Objectively, they're great for learning shapes and they squish nicely, but let me tell you, when you step on the corner of the hexagon block in bare feet at four in the morning while carrying a screaming child who refuses to sleep, you'll curse the very concept of geometry. They're decent toys, but I vastly prefer the teethers that don't double as nocturnal landmines.

What my doctor mate actually said about all this

Naturally, because my baseline state is low-level panic, I ended up cornering my mate Sarah, who works as a GP for the NHS, at a pub lunch. I tried to casually explain the diet these internet influencers push—which apparently involves extreme fasting to "force out testosterone"—while wiping mashed banana off my trousers.

Sarah looked at me with the weary expression of a medical professional who has seen too much. From what I gathered through the din of the pub, manipulating your facial bones at home doesn't make you look like a Greek god; it mostly just risks giving you a severe temporomandibular joint disorder, which sounds incredibly painful and expensive to fix. She mentioned that eating disorders and body dysmorphia in teenage boys are rising at a terrifying rate, and a lot of it seems tied to these algorithms that start by showing a kid a video about doing push-ups and within two hours have them convinced they need to change their entire skeletal structure to be worthy of human affection.

The terrifying speed of the algorithm

That's the part that genuinely keeps me up at night. It's not just the bizarre nature of the content; it's how aggressively it gets pushed. I look at my girls, currently wearing matching Flutter Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuits. They look incredibly sweet, completely oblivious to the crushing weight of societal expectations. I bought these bodysuits because the organic cotton doesn't trigger Twin B's mild eczema, and the little ruffled sleeves make her look like a slightly grumpy cherub. The biggest physical pressure they face right now is trying to put both of their legs into the same trouser hole.

But the internet comes for everyone eventually. If you search for something totally innocuous online today, the invisible machinery behind the screen immediately tries to radicalize you. A boy looks up a basic workout routine, and the platform assumes he hates himself and feeds him videos of twenty-year-old men shouting about jawlines, asserting that only a tiny percentage of hyper-masculine men will ever be happy.

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How we might actually handle this mess

Rather than throwing our wireless router into the Thames and forcing the girls to communicate via carrier pigeon until they're thirty, we're probably just going to have to talk to them constantly when they're older about why internet people are shouting at them. I suspect it involves having awkward, messy conversations about how most of these dramatic online physical transformations involve expensive cosmetic surgery, lighting tricks, and filters, rather than just pulling on your teeth.

Page 47 of a parenting book I once read suggested maintaining a "calm, authoritative presence regarding digital boundaries," which I find deeply unhelpful. I highly doubt I'll be calm when my kids are teenagers. I'll likely be an anxious, hovering mess. But maybe if we start early—focusing on what their bodies can do, like running, jumping, and eventually carrying their own backpacks so I don't have to—they won't be as susceptible to a bloke on a screen telling them they need to change their bone structure to matter.

Before you fall down your own internet anxiety spiral, perhaps redirect that energy into something practical. Complete your baby essentials and explore Kianao's play gym collection and organic baby blankets for a much safer, vastly more pleasant shopping experience.

Questions I still ask myself at 2 AM

Is there any actual science behind these online jawline exercises?
From what my GP mate told me between sips of a lukewarm pint, absolutely not. The medical consensus seems to be that you can't safely reshape your skull with your bare hands, and trying to do so just ruins your teeth and your jaw joints. It's essentially pseudo-science dressed up as self-improvement.

How do I stop the algorithm from showing this rubbish to my kids?
I honestly don't think you can entirely stop it, which is the terrifying part. You can put on all the parental controls available, but kids talk at school, and the algorithms are designed to slip through cracks. I'm operating under the assumption that they'll see it, and my job is to be the annoying voice in their head reminding them it's absolute nonsense.

Should I be worried if my toddler is obsessed with chewing on things?
No, thank goodness. If your two-year-old is chewing on the coffee table, their fingers, or a silicone panda, they're just teething or exploring the world. It's completely biologically normal for infants and toddlers to chew. It only becomes a psychological crisis when they're sixteen and doing it for internet clout.

What's the best way to talk to kids about online body image?
I'm still figuring out how to get my girls to eat peas without throwing them at the wall, so I'm no expert here. But from everything I've read, the trick seems to be pointing out the illusions early. Showing them how lighting works, explaining what filters are, and generally demystifying the smoke and mirrors of social media before they internalize it as reality.