There’s a song that’s been in my head all week, and no, it’s not from Taylor Swift’s new album. It’s by a far more sophisticated songwriter than Swift: Ms Rachel. The song is called Big Feelings and it goes: “Big feelings are OK / I’m here to stay with your big feelings.”

Thanks to the trend for gentle parenting, the concept of “big feelings” has become big money online, and for the most part I welcome that (Big Feelings isn’t the only song that reflects this cultural shift; the animation Small Potatoes on CBeebies has a song that goes “Feelings / I’ve got so many feelings”, which my husband likes to sing to me when I’m premenstrual). As a parent, strong emotions are hard to escape: you’re feeling them, the small child in your home is feeling them and, in one of the biggest departures for us as a species, so are myriad other children on your social media feed.

Indeed, footage of babies and children crying is so commonplace on some platforms that many parents don’t even question it. I don’t have TikTok and my Instagram algorithm is mostly fixated on soup and witchcraft, but when a colleague told me that she found the trend disturbing, not to mention morally dubious, I watched some of the videos myself.

What I found was video after video of children at their most vulnerable. Crying, shouting, screaming, and sometimes lashing out physically. I have of course been witness to these moments in my own house, but seeing someone else’s child going through it feels excruciatingly uncomfortable, especially when that child is not being comforted by their own parent. Least forgivable is a genre of video in which mothers subject their children to sinus clearing while their baby or toddler cries and........

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