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BABIES! Children! Offspring! Not only can they be a vital well of much-needed organs in later life, they’re also one of the foremost sources of online social media gratification available! Post a cute pic of your kid being cute and watch those likes roll in!

But what if your infant won’t get with the program? Sometimes children are too young to realise the value of a retweet, and will steadfastly refuse to turn their stupid cute faces to the camera. Here’s 5 tips for any parent out there who wants those sweet notifications to start rolling in!

1) Be patient!

No matter how many times you repeat your child’s name, they’ll just keep playing, and learning, and developing their motor skills, all while ignoring you! So it’s important to just wait… always have your phone or camera at the ready for when they turn and hit that perfect pose. In many ways, taking the perfect snap of a toddler has less in common with true photography, and more in common with say, bow-hunting a deer.

2) Snap everything.

Sometimes, you just have to play the odds. Your kid may never stare down the lens with that cherubic look on their face that your sister’s kids have in her Facebook posts, so you’ll just have to up your coverage. Start taking pictures of your baby at dawn, and just continue to do so throughout the day. Scour the images at night to find something that could be posted on Instagram without you looking like a bad parent. Sure, the kid might only smile when he’s licking something he picked out of the bin, but if it means a cute picture, you can crop the garbage out later!

3) Use the same picture over and over

kids are easier to photograph when they’re smaller, before their little minds develop and they want to do something other than pose for a relentless barrage of Facebook profilers. So if you have a treasured picture of them when they were small, simply use Paint to crop them out of that, and paste them into new shots! People may ask why the kid appears to not be aging as the months turn into years, but you can just ignore them. Alternatively, just circle the babies face and paste that onto shots of them as they grow up, like some sort of ghoulish baby-face mask.

4) Use someone else’s kids.

If your ungrateful asshole baby won’t pose cutely for you, then find one that will. In a shopping centre, on the street, on the bus… if you see a cute kid, just quickly sidle up to them and take a sneaky selfie. People won’t notice that you’re tagging yourself in pictures with an increasingly disparate group of infants; nobody really looks at these things anyways.

5) Draw a face on your knee

This one is so foolproof, you don’t even need an actual child! Simply hug your knee close to your chest, and draw a face on it. Drape a blanket around it, and selfie away to your hearts content! “Just snuggling up to my baby”, “Me and my baby watching some TV LOL”… You can post a full range of social media staples, while your own kid does whatever the hell he wants elsewhere in the house. #SOCUTE!