The subject of parents having a favourite child is hotly contested.
Nevertheless, New York-based TikToker Alex Griswold has found a telltale indicator, and the failsafe hack has startled scores of social media users.
Your aspirations of being your parents’ favourite – and, more significantly, of “winning” over your siblings – will be dashed by the “password child” TikTok hypothesis.
The viral fad, according to the “Daily Mail”, advances a convincing idea that will enable you to determine who your parents’ favourite child is based on their online passwords. Be prepared to simultaneously feel personally attacked and impressed.
Influencer Griswold and his wife Melissa, who call themselves “your favourite internet parents,” have advanced the theory. Griswold uploaded the video to his TikTok account, where it has since received over 1.5 million views.
@alexgriswold oops its 5.1 now
♬ original sound - Alex Griswold
The phenomena was described to his audience by Griswold in response to one of his follower’s questions, “Which one of you is the password child?”
He explains in the trending TikTok clip video, that the password child is like when you’re trying to watch your parents’ Netflix, but it’s logged out.
“So then you ask ‘what’s the password’ and then they say your name or one of your sibling’s names, and then whichever name that is, is the favourite child,” Griswold says in the video. Several TikTokers expressed their opinions and personal experiences in jest, in the comments section.
“I’m an only child and I’m not even the password child,” someone quipped.
Another person said: “My sister is the password child, but I’m the one they come to when they forget the password.”
“I was the password child until my sister was born,” a fourth person alleged.
The hilarious comments are endless.
Since then, the term “I don't have a favorite child” has generated over 48.8 million similar videos, the majority of which are about the “password child,” thanks to the video’s success. According to the New York Post, TikTokers like Jasmine Ngugen and Clemence VP created humorous films in response to the craze in which they boasted about being the “password child”.
Some, on the other hand, remarked that while they might not be one of their parent’s password children, they are the others, for instance, they are their mum’s but not their dad’s password. The fad became so well-known that Urban Dictionary began using the term on Twitter.
A “password child” is, in the words of Urban Dictionary, “a slang term referring to the child whose name a parent uses as their computer password, meaning they’re the favourite child.”
Public denials of having a favourite child by parents are common, however it appears that this is not always the case.
According to Microsoft Start, researchers discovered that 74% of mothers and 70% of fathers gave one of their children preferential treatment in a prior study titled “My Pride and Joy: Predicting Favouritism and Disfavouritism in Mother-Adult Child Relations” that was published in the “Journal of Marital and Family Therapy”.
The trend continues gaining popularity, and there are numerous videos on the subject with people discussing how they learned they were the golden child of one parent but not the other. Several people came to realise that the dog was truly the favourite child in the household.
Nothing hurts worse, this person jokingly said, “than having a dog replace a child as a password”.