The Mason Disick Baby Hoax and My Massive Digital Parenting Panic

My mum told me on Tuesday that if I ever post another photo of the girls online, criminals on the dark web will steal their identities and open credit cards in their names. A bloke I vaguely know from the playground named Dave insisted that if I don’t secure their first-and-last-name Instagram handles immediately, they’ll be completely unhirable by the year 2040. Then our NHS health visitor dropped by, looked at my phone, and suggested I try to keep them away from all screens until they're twenty-seven, though she said it with the hollow eyes of a woman who knows I won't last until Friday.

I was standing in our kitchen in London, covered in something wet that I sincerely hoped was just water from the dog bowl, trying to process this barrage of conflicting advice while staring at the absolute drivel flashing across my phone screen. Somebody had just entirely fabricated a one-year-old child for a fifteen-year-old reality television star.

You probably missed it if you've a life, but the internet went into a complete meltdown over a fake rumour about a secret infant belonging to Kourtney Kardashian’s eldest son. A troll literally manifested a child named Piper into existence, created fake impersonation accounts, and watched the chaos unfold until Kourtney had to publicly tell everyone to stop spinning lies about a teenager. It's utterly absurd, but reading about that whole bizarre hidden infant situation sent me into an immediate, sweating spiral about raising kids in a world where reality is apparently optional.

The sheer terror of the digital footprint

Let’s talk about the absolute nightmare of raising children in an era where anyone can right-click and save your life. When I was growing up, the worst thing that could happen to a terrible photo of me was my mum putting it in a physical album that sat in a dusty cupboard, only to be dragged out to humiliate me in front of my first girlfriend. Now, a photo of Florence face-planting into a bowl of spaghetti could technically live forever on a server in Nevada, waiting to be repurposed by someone who finds it amusing.

The paranoia sets in the moment you realise you've zero control over who's looking at these images once they leave your phone. You send a harmless snap of the twins in their nappies to your mother-in-law, and she immediately uploads it to her Facebook page, which is public, and populated by five hundred "friends," half of whom are probably automated bots selling cryptocurrency. You ask her to take it down, and she treats you like you’ve just insulted her religion, leading to a tense Sunday roast where nobody speaks and I eat far too many roast potatoes out of sheer anxiety.

Then there's the existential dread of modern impersonation, which is what the whole fake Disick offspring saga really highlighted for me. What happens when some bored teenager in a basement decides to create a fake profile for Matilda, using photos they’ve scraped from my very own seemingly private accounts? The idea that someone could commandeer my two-year-old’s identity for a joke makes my blood run completely cold, and it’s exhausting trying to anticipate threats that didn't even exist a decade ago.

I did try downloading one of those heavy-duty parental monitoring apps once, but it just made me feel like an MI5 agent spying on Peppa Pig, so I deleted it and had a biscuit instead.

What the exhausted doctor actually told me about screens

I brought all of this up at our last checkup, trying to sound like a responsible father rather than a man who had spent three hours awake at 3 AM reading conspiracy theories on Reddit. Our GP, Dr. Evans, is a saint, but when I asked her about the medical consensus on digital exposure and mental health, she just sighed heavily. I think there are official guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics—or maybe I read a summary of them on Twitter—suggesting that early social media exposure rots the developing brain, but honestly, nobody seems to know for sure.

Dr. Evans mumbled something about how the constant influx of online rumours and cyberbullying is driving teenage anxiety through the roof, though she freely admitted her data was mostly anecdotal, based on her own fourteen-year-old son who hasn't spoken a verbal word to her since Christmas. She mentioned that delaying their access to the internet seems to act as a protective buffer, but she said it with a shrug that clearly implied we're all just making this up as we go along and hoping for the best.

Focusing on the physical things I can actually control

Since I can't physically fight an internet troll, I try to channel my intense parental anxiety into protecting the things I can actually touch, like my children's violently sensitive skin. Both Florence and Matilda inherited my terrible complexion, meaning they break out in angry red patches if a synthetic fibre so much as looks at them from across the room.

This brings me to the one piece of baby gear I'll really defend to the death: the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. I don't usually get emotional about clothing, but this sleeveless onesie saved my sanity during the Great Heatwave of last summer. We were stuck in a Pizza Express in Woking, the twins were sweating, and Florence decided to have a catastrophic nappy blowout right as the dough balls arrived.

Because these bodysuits are made of 95% organic cotton, they breathe properly, meaning the girls weren't stewing in their own sweat to begin with. More importantly, they've 5% elastane, which meant I could stretch the neck hole wide enough to pull the soiled garment straight down over her body, rather than dragging the mess up over her head and into her hair (a rookie mistake you only make once). The fabric is completely free of all the nasty chemical dyes that trigger their eczema, and even after being washed at 40 degrees a hundred times to remove various questionable stains, they haven't lost their shape. It's just a genuinely brilliant, functional piece of fabric that makes my life marginally less chaotic.

Trying to keep them offline with wooden objects

In my ongoing, desperate bid to keep them engaged in the three-dimensional world rather than staring at my phone, we’ve acquired an alarming amount of wooden and rubber toys. Some of them are great. Some of them are just things you trip over in the dark.

We have the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. Look, I’ll be completely honest with you: they're blocks. They're perfectly fine, brightly coloured rubber squares that are allegedly designed to promote logical thinking and early mathematical skills, but let's not kid ourselves. Florence doesn't understand subtraction. She understands throwing.

The only real benefit to these specific blocks is that they're soft. When Matilda inevitably decides she has had enough of her sister's architectural interference and lobs a block at my temple while I'm trying to drink my morning coffee, it doesn't leave a bruise. They're BPA-free and they float in the bath, which is mildly entertaining for about four minutes, but honestly, they're just rubber cubes taking up space in my living room.

When teething turns your child into a feral badger

Speaking of physical ailments that distract me from my digital footprint panic, the twins are currently getting their back teeth, which means my house sounds like a permanent wildlife documentary. The drool is biblical. Page 47 of the parenting manual my mother-in-law gave me suggests you remain calm and sing softly to them during teething, which I found deeply unhelpful at 3 AM when Matilda was trying to chew on my kneecap.

I ended up buying this Panda Teether out of pure, sleep-deprived desperation because it looked vaguely ridiculous. It's shaped like a little panda, made of food-grade silicone, and it's weirdly works well. The flat shape is easy for their sticky little hands to grip, and the textured bits seem to hit the exact spot on their gums that's causing them so much grief.

But my personal favourite is the other one we got, the Violet Bubble Tea Teether, which I can't link here but you can find on the site. It's shaped like a cup of boba tea, which appeals to my millennial sensibilities, but more importantly, you can chuck it in the fridge for twenty minutes. The cold silicone numbs their gums just enough to stop them from biting their own fingers (and mine). I don't know the exact science behind it, but anything that stops a toddler from shrieking is basically magic in my book.

If you're also currently hiding in your kitchen, stress-shopping while trying to block out the sound of Cocomelon, you can check out Kianao’s collection of baby toys and try to buy yourself five minutes of peace.

My incredibly messy attempt at a family media plan

Kourtney Kardashian apparently dealt with her kids' secret internet accounts by just deleting them entirely and disabling all the comments on their public profiles, which honestly seems like a completely rational response to a world that has lost its mind.

I keep telling myself I need to write down a formal "Family Media Plan" like the from what I've read, but right now, my plan consists of panic-Googling my daughters' names once a month and aggressively untagging myself from unflattering photos on Facebook. If you're trying to figure out how to handle this with your own kids, instead of trying to audit your entire digital life in one afternoon and having a breakdown, maybe just try turning your social media profiles to private, politely threatening any relatives who post photos of your kids without asking, and accepting that you can't control everything.

Before we get to the questions I know you're quietly panicking about in your head, take a deep breath, put the kettle on, and check out Kianao’s full range of things that are really real, tangible, and designed to make parenting slightly less terrifying.

Questions I ask myself at 2 AM

What do I honestly do if someone makes a fake account pretending to be my kid?

If you find yourself in the horrific situation where someone is impersonating your toddler (which is wild, but here we're), don't engage with the troll. Go straight to the platform's reporting tools, flag it for impersonation of a minor, and get your friends to mass-report it too. The platforms are notoriously slow, but a barrage of reports usually forces a human moderator to honestly look at it and take the fake profile down.

Is it already too late if I posted their baby photos on my public Instagram?

I constantly worry about this because I definitely posted photos of the twins when I was too sleep-deprived to understand privacy settings. It’s not "too late." You can go back right now, archive those old public photos, and lock your account down. You can't scrub the internet completely clean, but you can stop adding fresh fuel to the fire today.

How am I supposed to explain internet rumours to a toddler?

You don't. At two years old, Florence thinks the dog controls the weather. But as they get older, my incredibly loose plan is to just constantly point out things on TV or iPads that aren't real. The goal is to raise kids who naturally assume everything they see on a screen is a bit of a lie until proven otherwise, rather than waiting until they're teenagers to explain that people fabricate whole secret lives for attention.

Do those intense parental control routers genuinely work?

A mate of mine bought one of those military-grade routers that filters out malicious content at the source. He says it's brilliant for stopping his older kids from stumbling onto horrible websites, but it also accidentally blocked his smart fridge and his wife's gardening blog. They work, but be prepared to spend a lot of time troubleshooting why your television suddenly thinks it's in North Korea.

Why do people make up fake celebrity infants anyway?

Because the internet is broken and people are incredibly bored. There's an entire economy built on clicks and engagement, and nothing gets people clicking faster than a scandalous, entirely fabricated story about a teenager. It's a grim reminder that engagement metrics don't care about truth, which is exactly why we've to be the ones acting as the bouncers for our kids' digital lives.