Walk into any coffee shop or high school hallway right now, and you’ll find kids and young adults filming themselves for a viral TikTok trend called “How to kidnap me…”. The premise is simple: creators list the small, daily indulgences that would easily lure them into a stranger’s car. Usually, it’s a list of harmless, cozy, or aesthetic things—iced vanilla lattes, cozy nights, Target runs, or trendy sneakers.
It’s meant to be a playful, lighthearted way to share your personality. But if we step back and look at this trend with some basic, independent logic, we have to ask ourselves: When did we decide that the concept of child abduction was a cute personality trait?
Growing up in Yonkers, New York, you learned quickly to have some street smarts. You were taught to look both ways, pay attention to your surroundings, and never, under any circumstances, make it easy for a predator. Common sense was your armor. Yet today, the internet has successfully gamified our kids’ vulnerability, packaging real-world safety hazards into aesthetic, bite-sized content for clicks.
This isn’t just about being a party pooper; it’s about a deeper, systemic issue of desensitization. We are teaching our children to view serious dangers through a lens of ironic humor. When we normalize talking about “how to kidnap me,” we strip away the natural, healthy boundaries that keep children safe. We teach them that danger is just another punchline, another soundbite, or anotherCapCut template.
At the same time, we have to look at the corporate angle. Billionaire-backed social media companies build algorithms that actively reward this kind of oversharing. The more a child reveals about their specific vulnerabilities, routines, and desires, the more data is fed into the machine. We are literally training our kids to advertise their exact psychological triggers to the public—and to bad actors—all for the cheap dopamine hit of a few hundred views.
It’s time to think before we act. We need to do more to protect our kids and educate them—not by scaring them, but by teaching them the value of logical boundaries and personal privacy. Let’s leave the abductions out of the trend cycle, put down the phones, and bring some old-school common sense back to parenting.
