Small Things#17 – Dealing with the Momo Scare!

A few days back, I heard the older one’s friend talking about the Momo scare. It seemed that kids were talking about it in school. Later, my sister sent us a creepy video, showing how the Momo challenge messes around with young kids by popping up in between a popular cartoon series. While, the video was dismissed as a hoax but it correctly showed how evil, sick people could entice vulnerable kids and push them into doing dangerous things. To tell you the truth, even I was freaked out by Momo until an idea struck me!

Generally, parents would like to avoid talking about such challenges and it is okay. Less is always good. But in case, your kids know about it through friends or in school, what do you do? You find out a way to make them stay unaffected! What I did was I clowned around like Momo and made faces. After initial wonder, my kids burst into laughter. I established that Momo was insignificant in every way possible (actually poor Momo was just a sculpture by some Japanese artist). You could punch it and it will cry and run away. I took away the power of Momo to scare my kids.

BUT! I told them this was the second way of dealing with scare. First rule was to remember the instructions (updated version) by Mahatma Gandhi’s three wise monkeys – do not chat with strangers on the internet, do not watch bad things on the internet, do not listen to bad things on the internet.

With great power of the internet comes great responsibility for parents. Evil is right there on mobile phones, iPad and TV. We are now a part of the world wide web, we can’t break free but what we can do is to be watchful and alert when kids are using the devices.

How would you deal with such dangerous challenges?

Image courtesy Google