That Viral Donkey Game Is Ruining My Search History

I was pumping at three in the morning in my dark Chicago apartment, half-asleep, trying to find a specific wooden animal push-toy my mother-in-law swore was the secret to getting my toddler to walk. I typed what I thought was an innocent phrase into my phone with one thumb while the pump chugged away. What loaded on my screen wasn't a sustainably sourced European nursery item. It was a cartoonishly well-endowed, pantsless man-beast from an upcoming video game that I'll now need a solid year of therapy to unsee.

Listen, I spent five years in pediatric triage before I became a stay-at-home mom. I've pulled beads, coins, and unidentified sticky masses out of orifices you didn't know existed. Nothing much phases me anymore. Blood, vomit, and weird rashes are just Tuesday. But the internet is a deeply chaotic place right now, and if your older kid or your clueless partner is looking up early childhood milestones online, we need to have a very quick chat about search algorithms and digital hygiene.

The bizarre internet rabbit hole

If you live under a rock, or if you just spend your days wiping pureed peas off the ceiling like I do, you might not know what the baby steps donkey man search trend actually is. It has absolutely nothing to do with infant development. It's an indie video game coming out in 2025 by a developer named Bennett Foddy. The game is literally called Baby Steps, which is a brutally misleading title for anyone with a child under two.

The game follows a thirty-five-year-old unemployed guy named Nate who wears a dirty onesie and has to relearn how to walk in a weird surreal world. Honestly, walking around in a soiled onesie and struggling with basic motor skills sounds exactly like my toddler, but that's where the similarities end. The game is loaded with mature themes, depression, and drug references. And then there are the donkey characters.

I made the mistake of looking at the baby steps donkey man uncensored search results just to see what the gaming community panic was about, and frankly, my retinas are still burning. They're these anthropomorphic creatures that don't wear pants. The game developers thought it would be hilarious to include full frontal male nudity as a visual gag. There's a censorship toggle in the game settings, but apparently it just slaps a giant, comedic black bar over the area, which honestly just draws more attention to it. If you fall down the baby steps donkey reddit rabbit hole, you'll mostly just find a bunch of teenagers and college kids arguing about graphics and making weird memes about it.

Algorithm roulette is a losing game

This is where my blood pressure actually spikes. I don't care what adults play on their PlayStations behind closed doors. But I care deeply about how YouTube and TikTok algorithms categorize content. The internet is run by mindless code that sees the words baby and steps and decides this content belongs next to Miss Rachel and videos of kids unboxing plastic eggs.

I remember sitting in a pediatric neurology seminar once, and the attending physician was talking about early media exposure. The science is always a bit murky because you can't exactly run ethical control groups on this stuff, but I vaguely recall her saying that a developing prefrontal cortex really struggles to categorize surreal, adult-themed satire when it's disguised as a cartoon. The American Academy of Pediatrics says we should actively co-view all media with our children, which is a beautiful, poetic sentiment if you happen to have a full-time staff and zero household chores.

In the real world, sometimes you just need to hand your kid the iPad so you can chop an onion without committing accidental manslaughter. And that's when the autoplay feature betrays you. Your kid is watching a harmless video about farm animals, the algorithm sees a spike in donkey-related gaming content, and suddenly your three-year-old is watching a streamer scream profanities at a naked digital farm animal. It's exhausting trying to stay ahead of it all.

I refuse to tell you to lock all your screens in a safe and move to the woods because we're all just surviving here. Just check the restricted mode on your devices and maybe scrub your shared family search history if your teenager has been looking up gaming videos.

Browse our collection of actual, screen-free baby toys here.

What we actually put on our kids

Since my midnight search for walking aids was a total disaster, I ended up talking to my doctor about footwear instead. She said bare feet are technically best for early walkers so they can feel the ground, but you try letting a kid walk barefoot on a Chicago sidewalk in November and see how fast you get reported to child services. You need something that protects their feet but bends like a pretzel.

We eventually bought the Baby Sneakers Non-Slip Soft Sole First Shoes from Kianao. I'll admit, I bought them mostly because they look like tiny boat shoes and I'm a sucker for anything that makes my kid look like a tiny, retired accountant. But they're genuinely my favorite thing we own right now. My toddler destroys traditional stiff shoes. He just scuffs the toes into oblivion within an hour. These have a soft, pliable sole that bends with his weird, jerky little movements. He wore the brown ones to a family wedding, and they were the only part of his outfit that didn't end up covered in frosting. They stay on his feet even when he's having a full meltdown in the dairy aisle.

If you're looking for other basics, we also use the Bamboo Baby Spoon and Fork Set. Honestly, it's just okay. It's bamboo and silicone, so it does exactly what it's supposed to do. The handle is nice for him to grip. Just a warning from one parent to another, don't let your kid eat dal or anything with turmeric using the lighter colored silicone tips unless you want them stained a fluorescent yellow for the rest of eternity. I learned that the hard way, and now we just pretend the yellow spoon is a special edition.

Pants that really stay up

While we're on the subject of keeping bottoms appropriately covered, finding pants for a kid who's transitioning from crawling to walking is a nightmare. Everything is either too tight around the diaper or so loose it trips them up.

I'm highly suspicious of most trendy baby clothes, but the Baby Pants in Organic Cotton are solid. They have this harem-style drop crotch. Yes, they look a bit like tiny MC Hammer pants, which is objectively hilarious. But more importantly, they fit over the massive, bulky cloth diapers my husband insists on using when he gets in a mood about saving the planet. They have a real drawstring, which is weirdly hard to find in baby clothes. Usually you just get a fake decorative string stitched onto the front, which helps exactly no one when the elastic stretches out.

When I can't deal with waistbands at all, I just put him in the Baby Jumpsuit Organic Cotton. I hate pulling things over a screaming toddler's head. It feels like trying to wrestle an angry, damp octopus into a sock. This one buttons down the front. You just lay it flat, throw the kid on top, and button them in before they realize what's happening. The organic cotton is soft, it washes well, and it doesn't give him those weird little red friction bumps behind his knees.

Triage for your digital life

In the hospital, triage is entirely about sorting priorities. A kid with a skinned knee goes to the waiting room, while a kid with a compromised airway goes straight back. Parenting is exactly the same. You have to decide what's going to kill you today and what can wait until tomorrow.

Obsessing over whether your kid ate enough organic kale is waiting room stuff. But making sure your shared family iPad isn't quietly feeding your toddler existential dread and weird adult gaming humor via the autoplay feature is probably a priority-one situation right now. The algorithms are sloppy, the naming conventions for these indie games are ridiculous, and the tech companies don't care about your family's digital hygiene.

So audit the YouTube app, clear the search cache, and maybe have a deeply uncomfortable conversation with your teenage nephew about what he looks up on the shared wifi. Then pour yourself something strong and go back to worrying about the normal stuff, like how to get turmeric stains out of silicone.

Shop our full collection of safe, organic baby clothing.

The messy reality of early milestones

Why is my older kid suddenly talking about a donkey man?

Because the internet is a garbage fire, yaar. They probably saw a gaming streamer play the Bennett Foddy game on Twitch or TikTok. It's a highly anticipated adult video game, and the gaming community thinks the crude humor is peak comedy. Just tell them you know it's an adult satire game and block the keyword on their devices if they're young. If you make a huge screaming deal out of it, they're just going to look it up at their friend's house anyway.

How do I stop this stuff from showing up on my toddler's tablet?

You can't trust the basic YouTube algorithm at all right now because the game title uses common baby terminology. Go into the app settings, turn off autoplay, and set up a restricted profile. Better yet, just delete the main app and only use the dedicated kids version, though honestly even that slips up sometimes. I mostly just download specific shows ahead of time and turn off the wifi on the iPad.

Are push walkers seriously better than the seated baby walkers?

My doctor was pretty clear about this one, and the AAP agrees. Those plastic seated walkers with the wheels that kids sit inside are a massive safety hazard. Kids use them to launch themselves down stairs and reach hot coffee on counters. Push walkers, where the kid is standing behind it and pushing, are generally better for actual motor development, though they'll probably still ram it into your baseboards.

Do babies really need special shoes to learn to walk?

Not really. If they're indoors, bare feet are safest because they grip the floor better and it helps with proprioception, which is a fancy medical term for knowing where your body is in space. But when you're outside in public, you need shoes. Just pick something with a very thin, flexible sole that lets their foot bend naturally, rather than those miniature leather boots that look cute but force them to walk like Frankenstein.

Is the transition to walking always this chaotic?

Yes. It's a solid three months of your kid pulling up on unstable coffee tables, letting go, panicking, and falling backward like a felled tree. I spent weeks just trailing my kid around the living room with a throw pillow. They figure it out eventually, and then the real nightmare begins because suddenly they can reach the cabinet where you keep the snacks.