I love a funny video as much as anyone, and nowadays, there’s no shortage to go around.

Cats chasing bears off property, dogs seemingly whining, “I wuv you!” and the unfailingly funny goats licking electric fences.

Which always reminds me, for some reason, of Stevie Nicks.

When it comes to children being featured on viral videos, I’ve smiled when a toddler begins impulsively dancing to a busker on a street, and who hasn’t seen the boy coming to after a dental procedure, shaking off the anesthesia, quite sure that he’s dead?

But what has recently caught my attention, both in videos sent to me by friends of their own kids, or the countless YouTube videos featuring kids, is that the child on camera at some point often asks, “Are you filming me?”

“No,” lied the mother in the poignant and adorable clip of the little Irish girl devastated to learn that she wasn’t invited to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. She had mistaken learning about her school’s royal tea party for an actual invitation, and dissolved into tears amid confusion while also realizing the mortification that her very heartfelt outburst would perhaps be seen by others.

There’s nothing like advice offered from a childless woman with zero practical experience in raising a brood, but I’m thinking this just can’t be healthy.

In today’s world, I’ve heard mental health professionals say children are keenly aware that they haven’t got their parents’ full attention should a parent be glancing at emails on their phone while reading a bedtime story. Or cheering them at soccer, or listening inattentively at a recital. 

Last year, a second-grade teacher posted on Facebook the answers a class of children gave when asked, “What do you wish had never been invented?”

Four out of 21 children responded, “The phone.”

“If I had to tell you what invention I don’t like, I would say that I don’t like the phone,” wrote one little girl. “I don’t like the phone because my panert (sic) are on their phone every day. A phone is sometimes a really bad habet (sic). I hate my mom’s phone and wish she never had one. That is an invention I don’t like.”

For good measure, she illustrated her assignment with a drawing of a cellphone slashed through with a giant “X” and a speech bubble next to it in where she’d added, “I hate it.”

Pretty dark feelings of resentment from a little kid.

I can’t help but to wonder how the children that are the focus of particular “Mommie blogs” will sort through their feelings when they’re aware that not only every tantrum they’ve exhibited, but every foul diaper, every tearful request, as well as photos documenting every type of behavior has been posted for the world to see.

“Betrayed Child” blogs may be the rebuttal.

Think back about how embarrassed we all were when our mothers would trot out the family album when we brought our boy and girlfriends home for dinner and laughingly showed the obligatory photographs of us lying naked on a rug as a chubby-cheeked 8-month-old, or sitting dutifully on the pot, diaper around our ankles.

Think back to our childhood displays of frustration, our preteen outbursts of angst and drama, safely tucked away in our memories that still trigger cringing when recalled. To even imagine those being filmed and posted for millions to view…

“Are you recording me?” the little Irish girl, Lola, asks between tears. Her mother replies, “No,” and abruptly stops recording her. Then posted the scene on YouTube. 

I wonder that if children ever suspect that their competition for parental attention, the cellphone, is surreptitiously recording their conversations or confrontations with their mothers and fathers, will they continue to approach them for help or advice? Will a bullied child have to even consider that their tearful confession of schoolyard degradation possibly go public?

There’s an awful lot of criticism going around about how young people seem to have no real concept of what it means when they live their lives publicly. How getting “hearts” or “likes” on social media is viewed as currency. That nothing seems important enough to be personal and private anymore.

And I wonder when the roots of that were planted.