A mom who posts on TikTok as summerhylton did not try to name the phase her baby is in. The text she put on her six-second video just says, “in whatever stage this is.” The clip shows what she means, and then it shows her getting even.
It opens inside a car with her face filling the left side of the frame. Her blonde hair is stretched in a thick rope across her jaw and neck, and at the far end of it is a small fist, clamped shut, belonging to a baby dressed in pink. The mom has her own hand wrapped around the baby’s wrist. Over the first second and a half her expression goes from a tight squint to a full grimace with her mouth open, and the hair stays pulled tight the whole time.
@summerhylton And she thinks it’s hilarious 😵💫with her little peach fuzz 😭
Then the camera swings over to the one responsible. The baby’s head comes into view in profile, nearly bald, with a fine layer of pale fuzz and not much else. A hand wearing a ring and a bracelet comes down from the top of the frame, finds a wisp of hair at the crown, and pinches it between two fingers. For the rest of the clip, about three seconds, the hand stays right there, holding up that one tiny tuft while the baby keeps her head tucked down.
The baby’s face is turned away from the lens for most of the video, so her side of the story comes from the caption. “And she thinks it’s hilarious,” the mom wrote, adding a dizzy face emoji, “with her little peach fuzz,” followed by a crying one. The joke is in the mismatch. One of them has a handful of long hair to work with. The other has so little that her mom has to hunt for enough to pinch.
For parents whose babies have found their hair, the first two seconds of the clip are the useful part, because of where the mom’s hand is. She is not pulling her head away. She is holding the baby’s wrist, right next to the fist. That is the move that keeps a hair pull from getting worse. A baby’s grip does not let go when the hair is tugged in the other direction, it only pulls harder on the scalp. Keeping the little hand close to your head takes the tension off while you work on the fingers.
Getting the fingers open is easier from the pinky side. Slide one of your own fingers into the baby’s palm and the fist tends to loosen around it, or put something else in reach that is more interesting to hold. In a car, where a parent and a baby are pressed close together with nowhere to go, it helps to have that something else ready before the hair gets grabbed. A teether or a soft toy within arm’s reach of the seat does the job.
The simplest fix is the hair itself. Long hair worn down and hanging over the shoulder closest to the baby is an open invitation. A bun, a braid, a claw clip or a hat removes the target, and plenty of parents keep a hair tie on their wrist for exactly this reason.
Her caption points to the other half of the problem, which is that the baby thinks it is funny. A wince, a yelp and a big face are a show, and a baby who gets a show will happily ask for another one. A calm face and a quiet “gentle,” said while guiding the open hand to stroke your hair or your cheek, gives her something to do with that hand and nothing much to laugh at.
None of that rules out a joke once the hair is free. What the mom does in return is a pinch and a hold on a wisp of fuzz, filmed in close-up for other parents, and the baby does not so much as lift her head. It is a bit for the adults watching, and it works because every parent with long hair has thought about it.
She also did not need a name for what her baby is doing in order to post about it. “In whatever stage this is” covers it. Babies grab whatever is within reach, and for a while that is going to be the person holding them.