You'd have to be an extraordinary sociopath to provoke your kids to tears and then film them for your viral video channel, but it hasn't stopped countless YouTubers from doing exactly that. No less sinister than feeding your girlfriend laxatives for views, vlogger moms and dads are jamming cameras into their young children's faces as they scream and cry, all in the name of content.

Meet The Norris Nuts, a hugely successful family YouTube channel, whose parents have managed to successfully leverage their children's tears into monetizable videos. Mom Brooke and Dad Justin film their kids Sabre, Sockie, Biggy, Naz and Disco (yes, this family is white), in classic videos like THIS PAINFUL NEWS CANNOT BE TRUE or I FEEL LIKE I LET EVERYONE DOWN and WE FOUND HER WITH MACULOPAPULAR RASH (SHOCKING).

A glance through their most popular videos shows thumbnails of their kids howling in distress. Check out their most recent vlog, OUR FIRST FUNERAL *extremely emotional* saying goodbye together as a family, just short of a million views. It's a deeply weird video showing Naz and her sisters crying about her dead pet fish – she reads out a eulogy and breaks down. And like, fine – she's a kid. You could say that this is an innocent video that just shows the imagination of a young girl.

But when the family's most viral clips are almost exclusively crying children, at some point you have to ask – what the hell are the parents thinking?

Exploiting children for clicks is properly unsettling. The parents behind The Norris Nuts should be called out for cashing in their kids by making them cry. And you're pretty odd too if you actually want to watch their videos.

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@hshukman