Here's What's Wrong With That Viral BBC Video

From Redbook

Picture this: You’re a dad who is also an esteemed academic, about to give a live expert interview from the comfort of your home office. Suddenly, your kids toddle into the room unexpectedly, one after the other, with no regard for the fact that your father is making ~big career moves~. Mom saves the day by swooping into action and removing the kids from the room in record time. A little embarrassing, but all’s well that ends well, right? Not exactly.

That’s how things went down for Robert E. Kelly, a newly internet-famous political scientist who was recently interviewed by BBC News for his expertise about North and South Korea. His segment was interrupted by Kelly’s two very cute kids, who innocently wandered into the room in full view of the camera and acted like a pair of adorable menaces.

If you haven’t seen it already – unlikely, given that it went viral near instantly – it’s a funny video. See for yourself:

Unfortunately, what might have remained just a silly viral video – particularly humorous for a multitude of reasons, like how the toddler struts into the room, the baby rolling in moments after, and the mom skidding into the room to retrieve them like a damn superhero – couldn’t remain just that for long.

Many viewers made the lofty claim that the video was emblematic of the patriarchy – after all, Kelly makes no move to get up and remove his kids himself, seemingly waiting for his wife or whomever to come get them (which, to her credit, she does). That’s not an unfair take on the situation, but it strikes me as overly simplistic. Viewers don’t know Kelly as a man, a father, or a husband – he’s not a widely-known public figure. They have no basis for so deeply reading into his inaction and tying him into this sexist parenting perspective. Is it that outlandish to think that maybe he was just frozen in a panic and doing his best to continue this legitimately very important interview as if nothing was wrong, hoping his kid would eventually tire of video-bombing her dad and leave the room on her own?

A lot of viewers also shared their distress about how the kids were physically handled in the video. Kelly gave his toddler a gentle push back once the little girl came within arm’s reach. From the online backlash, you’d have thought he tossed her across the room. But people really got up in arms about the behavior of the woman who rushed in to grab the toddler and the baby who rolled on in after her. In the video, the woman, in a frantic rush to remove the kids, jerks the toddler’s arm a bit when it becomes clear that the kid isn’t going to come along easily. The tantrum-throwing little girl can be heard making a fuss even after being taken out of the room.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it again anyway: Judging parents based on a sum total 40 seconds of their lives – and an extremely stressful 40 seconds at that – is wrong. Hundreds of armchair childcare experts have deemed them bad (or even abusive) parents, based on their handling of the kids. Writer Roxane Gay, who retweeted the clip and was clearly amused by it, was (as usual) articulate and incisive in shutting down these charges.

Gay is exactly right – the assumptions people are making about a video that clocks in under 1 minute are absurd. And what’s worse: The people doing the judging expect us to believe they’ve never lost their patience and handled their mid-tantrum kid a little more roughly than they normally would in a high-anxiety situation – like, say, when your kids interrupt dad’s high-profile live interview about the impeachment of the South Korean president and how that will affect already rocky world affairs.

Compare this interview to a stage performance – is it fair to expect a performer to stop what they’re doing to mind their child when they’re in the thick of doing their job? The kids in the video clip weren’t in distress – they didn’t require Kelly’s immediate attention or parenting. Attempting to move the little girl out of frame and nudge her towards the door was hardly the callous act that people are making it out to be. Are we really demonizing one father for prioritizing his career over his disruptive toddler for 40 seconds, blaming him for the admittedly problematic stereotyping of women as the primary caretaker in a family? And what if his wife had been the person who did this? Would she be a career-focused woman, or a bad parent?

There’s also a faction of viewers who automatically assumed, for a variety of troubling reasons, that the woman in the video was a “nanny” and not the kids’ mother. The rationale for this assumption ranged from “the kids don’t look like her” to “she looked panicked, like she was going to get in trouble for losing track of them.” That’s a gross misreading of the situation at best and straight-up racism at worst.

The Asian woman in the video is Kelly’s (who’s a white man) wife (and an understandably stressed mom of two kids under 5) Jung-a Kim, according to each of their public Facebook profiles and as reported by The Telegraph. Kelly’s mother confirmed this as well, calling the moment when Jung-a skids into frame to get the kids “the best part” of the video in an interview with the Daily Mail.

Regardless of how you reacted to the video – even if you just chuckled and moved on with your day – it’s worth taking a minute to consider why, exactly, this video has brought out such an array of extreme responses. There are obviously still people out there who are viewing the video for what it is – a funny viral video of kids doing silly kid things. But the speed with which people are willing to make assumptions about people they don’t know – and worse yet, the impulse to impose their ideas of what’s right and wrong upon others – are deeply ingrained, problematic societal tics.

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