TikTok’s ‘Cookie Challenge’ is teaching parents what their kids ‘need to work on’

Toddlers are not exactly known for their refined sense of morality or their ability to share. 

Ask any parent what happens when there’s one toy and two kids, and they’ll tell you. But hey, leave it to TikTok to turn this chaos into content. The Cookie Challenge is a simple but devilishly clever test of a child’s instincts. Set up a plate of treats for the family—one parent gets nothing, one gets a single cookie, and the child gets two.

What happens next? Does your little darling share their bounty? Do they look at you with the cold indifference of a future Wall Street executive and gobble up their two cookies without hesitation? Or do they cry, get confused, and try to solve the problem in their own toddler logic? TikTok parents across the globe are putting their kids to the test, posting videos of these mini morality plays for the world to see—and the results are predictably adorable and, occasionally, a little concerning.

Some toddlers immediately share a cookie. And then there are the unapologetic cookie hoarders—those who stare blankly at their cookie-less parent, shrug, and proceed to enjoy their double portion guilt-free.

Developmentally speaking, toddlers aren’t wired to share naturally. According to child psychologists, empathy and the ability to understand another person’s perspective begin developing around age two but don’t fully mature until much later. At this stage, toddlers are still figuring out the world and their place in it. Sharing, for them, is a complex negotiation between their immediate desires and the social cues they’re learning from their environment. 

Think about it: toddlers are impulsive by nature. Their first instinct is to claim what’s theirs. Sharing requires them to override that instinct, process someone else’s needs, and decide to act on it—all in the span of a few seconds. That’s a lot to ask. From an evolutionary psychology standpoint, resource hoarding is actually a perfectly rational behavior. Our ancestors evolved in environments of scarcity where sharing too freely could mean starvation. Young children’s reluctance to share high-value resources like food is an ancient survival instinct.

But a child who doesn’t share their cookies today isn’t doomed to a life of selfishness. Empathy and generosity are traits that develop over time through consistent reinforcement. Games that teach turn-taking, waiting, or delaying gratification can help kids develop these skills over time. Parents need to work on remembering that we, too, fail the cookie challenge daily.

How many of us share our resources generously with strangers? How many skip the extra latte to donate to charity? How many actually take the shopping cart back to the corral instead of abandoning it in a parking space? We definitely need to work on our pathological need to quantify, categorize, and rank our children’s development against arbitrary standards.