What is the baby boo challenge? (And why I nearly called 999)

It’s 7:14 am. I’m currently wearing what used to be a relatively clean grey t-shirt, now aggressively Jackson Pollock-ed with mashed banana and something I strongly suspect is yesterday’s sweet potato. The twins, Maya and Lily, are simultaneously screaming because I cut their toast into triangles instead of squares (a rookie mistake I'll apparently pay for until nap time). Enter my fourteen-year-old nephew, Liam, who's staying with us for the half-term holiday.

Liam walks into the kitchen, locks eyes with me, and suddenly begins violently jerking his neck. His arms flail out wildly, his shoulders spasm uncontrollably, and he lets out a strange, guttural vocal tick.

I drop the butter knife. My heart instantly relocates to my throat. I’m mentally mapping the fastest route to A&E at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, trying to calculate the physics of carrying two screaming toddlers while somehow dragging a convulsing teenager into the back of a tired Volvo.

Things that ran through my panicked brain in those three seconds:

• Has he eaten a washing pod?
• Is this a seizure?
• How much Calpol is the lethal limit, and did he drink it?
• I'm going to have to explain to my sister that I broke her firstborn son before breakfast.

I lunge forward. "Liam, mate, are you alright?" I shout, reaching for my phone in my back pocket to ring for an ambulance.

He stops immediately. He looks at me like I’ve just asked him to explain the concept of a fax machine. "I'm fine, Uncle Tom. I'm just doing the baby boo challenge."

I stood there, phone in hand, heart still hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, staring at this perfectly healthy teenager who had just voluntarily simulated a severe neurological meltdown. This was my deeply unwelcome introduction to the absolute garbage fire of modern internet trends. If you've been frantically Googling what's the baby boo challenge while hiding in the downstairs loo just to get two minutes of peace, let me save you the trouble. It’s not a medical crisis. It’s just the internet being a massive disappointment again.

Please stop faking neurological disorders for views

Once my blood pressure returned to a somewhat normal range, Liam kindly explained the mechanics of this nonsense to me while eating all of the expensive sourdough I'd bought for myself. Apparently, it’s a viral meme originating on TikTok. Teenagers are filming themselves dancing erratically, throwing in sudden, unpredictable bodily jerks, to a sped-up remix of an NBA YoungBoy song (specifically the lyric where he says "She gon' call me baby boo").

They jokingly claim they're infected with "Baby Boo Syndrome," creating this whole fake narrative that schools are shutting down worldwide because kids can't stop twitching.

It's incredibly stupid. And honestly, it made me furious.

I’m not usually one to aggressively police what teenagers do online—mostly because I'm too tired, and partly because I spent my own teenage years doing incredibly dumb things on skateboards—but this one really rubbed me the wrong way. By faking a "syndrome" that involves erratic physical jerks and involuntary vocalizations, these kids are essentially mocking the very real, very difficult tics linked to Tourette's syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder. It’s casual ableism dressed up as a dance trend.

I tried to explain this to Liam. I tried to tell him how isolating it must be for a neurodivergent kid to scroll through their phone and see millions of people pretending their daily struggle is a hilarious punchline. He just shrugged and mumbled something about it "not being that deep." I heavily debated hiding the Wi-Fi router in the bin.

My doctor mate reckons the internet is actually breaking our brains

A few days after the kitchen incident, I was at the playground pushing the girls on the swings. I bumped into my mate Sarah, who's a GP and also the mother of a terrifyingly energetic three-year-old named Leo. I mentioned the whole "baby boo" debacle to her, mostly just to vent about how exhausting teenagers are.

Sarah looked incredibly tired (though, to be fair, all of us at the park looked like we were surviving on instant coffee and spite). She told me that her clinic has actually seen a weird uptick in parents bringing in young teenagers who have developed sudden, unexplained physical tics.

According to her, there's some kind of documented phenomenon where kids watch so many of these fake syndrome videos on social media that their brains basically short-circuit and they start unconsciously mimicking the tics. They aren't faking it anymore; their bodies just start doing it. She mumbled some very long medical words about functional neurological disorders and mirror neurons, which I just nodded at while simultaneously trying to stop Lily from eating a handful of woodchips.

Obviously, I'm not a doctor. I barely passed my GCSE science. But listening to Sarah, it just reinforced my desperate desire to keep my girls away from screens for as long as humanly possible. I don't want them getting sucked into this weird e baby culture where your entire existence is just performing bizarre trends for an algorithm.

The only baby boo we acknowledge in this house

The sheer absurdity of the TikTok trend made me think about the actual, original "baby boo"—good old-fashioned peek-a-boo. You know, the game where you hide your face behind your hands and pop out, and your baby acts like you've just performed world-class sorcery.

When Maya and Lily were around six months old, peek-a-boo was the only thing keeping me sane. It's actually a massive developmental milestone. They're learning object permanence—the idea that just because my tired, baggy-eyed face is hidden behind a muslin cloth, it doesn't mean I've ceased to exist.

If we could just collectively agree to lob all the iPads into the Thames and go back to hiding behind pieces of fabric, I honestly think society would improve overnight.

Speaking of hiding behind fabric, we go through a ridiculous amount of blankets in our house. Between the spilled milk, the unidentifiable sticky patches, and the aforementioned projectile vomiting incidents, our washing machine never stops. A few months ago, in a sleep-deprived haze, I ordered the Colorful Leaves Bamboo Baby Blanket from Kianao.

I’m going to be entirely honest here: I bought it because it looked nice and I liked the leaf pattern. I didn't care about the organic bamboo blend at the time, I just needed something to mop up the baby-related chaos. But this blanket has survived some horrors. Maya literally threw up an entire bottle of formula onto it while we were stuck in traffic on the M25. I washed it at home, expecting it to come out feeling like cardboard, but it somehow got softer. The girls love it for our real peek-a-boo sessions because it's so light and breathable, I don't worry about them suffocating themselves while they hide from me under the coffee table. It's genuinely one of the few baby items we own that hasn't fallen apart or annoyed me.

If you're tired of internet trends and just want to stock up on things that honestly matter for your kid's real-world development, you should probably check out some of Kianao's organic baby blankets and play gear. It's way better than whatever nonsense TikTok is peddling today.

Trying to distract them with wooden things

Because I'm desperately trying to avoid screens, our living room looks like a small, highly disorganized wooden toy factory. In my noble quest to keep the girls grounded in reality, I got them the Bear Teething Rattle Wooden Ring.

Look, I'll give it to you straight. It's a very beautifully made toy. The beechwood ring is solid, the little crochet bear is incredibly cute, and I love that there's no nasty plastic chemicals because Lily puts literally everything in her mouth (including my shoes, if I leave them out).

But do they prefer it over the television remote? Absolutely not. If given the choice between this lovely, sustainable, handcrafted bear rattle and a dead AA battery they found under the sofa, they'll fight to the death over the battery. That being said, when I'm in the car and desperately need four minutes of silence so I can merge onto the motorway without having a panic attack, handing them this wooden rattle seriously works. They chomp on the wooden ring like little beavers. The crochet head does get quite soggy from all the drool, but it dries out eventually. It's fine. It does the job.

We also have the Rainbow Play Gym Set sitting in the corner of the room. When they were tiny, they used to lie under it and stare at the little wooden animals for ages. It looked brilliant—way nicer than those garish plastic monstrosities that play terrible electronic music until the batteries mercifully die. Now that they're two, they mostly use the wooden A-frame as a prop to try and vault over the sofa. I've also stubbed my toe on it twice in the dark. But it held up beautifully, and I'll probably pass it on to my sister (assuming I don't break her teenage son first).

Surviving the madness

honestly, dealing with the baby boo challenge, or whatever ridiculous trend replaces it next week, is just part of the modern parenting gig. You think you've got things figured out because you finally got the kids to eat broccoli, and then a teenager starts twitching in your kitchen and you think the world is ending.

I don't have a grand solution. I just know that the real world—the messy, noisy, exhausting real world of mashed bananas, soft bamboo blankets, and actual peek-a-boo—is so much better than the weird performative circus on our phones.

If you want to focus on real, tangible play instead of digital nonsense, grab some sustainable toys and blankets and just sit on the floor with your kids. It’s safer for your blood pressure, I promise.

Messy questions you probably still have

Is the baby boo syndrome an actual medical thing?
Absolutely not. It's 100% made up by teenagers on TikTok who think faking neurological tics is comedy gold. If your kid starts doing it, they aren't sick, they just have terrible taste in internet humor. (Though if you're ever genuinely worried about sudden tics, definitely ring your GP, because functional tics from watching too much TikTok are apparently a weirdly real phenomenon now).

How do I get my teenager to stop doing it?
If you figure this out, please email me. I tried explaining the deep, harmful ableism of mocking Tourette's, and my nephew just stared at me blankly. Honestly, the fastest way to kill a trend is to do it yourself in front of their friends. Start jerking around in the supermarket aisle while shouting "baby boo" and watch them die of embarrassment.

Why is it even called baby boo?
It's from a sped-up remix of a song by the rapper NBA YoungBoy. There's a lyric about a girl calling him "baby boo." The internet took that five-second audio clip, sped it up to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, and attached a twitching dance to it. Make it make sense. You can't.

Isn't actual peek-a-boo supposed to be good for babies?
Yes! Real peek-a-boo is brilliant. When I hide behind my hands, my two-year-olds are learning that things still exist even when you can't see them (which is apparently why they keep trying to find the biscuits I hid on top of the fridge). It's great for their little developing brains.

What's the best way to clean baby sick off a bamboo blanket?
Cold water first, always. Hot water bakes the sick into the fibers, which I learned the hard way. Rinse the worst of it off in the sink while trying not to gag, then chuck it in the washing machine on a gentle cycle. Our Kianao bamboo blanket honestly survived this exact process and lived to tell the tale.