How the Stanley Cup craze signals a larger crisis for teens

In December, a 13-year-old Australian girl Christmas list It went viral.

The teen has reportedly ordered a slew of expensive items to place under her tree, including Skims underwear, luxury Drunk Elephant and Dior skincare products, expensive Lululemon activewear, designer clothes, silk pajamas, a MacBook Pro, and, inevitably, Stanley Quencher H2. .0 FlowState stainless steel vacuum insulated tumbler.

Children with overly demanding Christmas lists are nothing new. But while greedy children in the past added a host of expensive toys to their lists, today teenagers and even prepubescent girls are demanding items more suitable for women in their 30s and 40s.

The reason for this has almost everything to do with the influence of social media. While teens have always been highly vulnerable to peer pressure, thanks to the rise of apps like Instagram and TikTok, those social circles have expanded to include the entire world.

This phenomenon has strangely thrust pre-teens and teens into a world far beyond their years. Now instead of asking for shiny Caboodles makeup bags, they're asking for Dior lip oil (which is $40). Instead of heading to stores like Justice or Aeropostale for age-appropriate basics, they spend their parents' credit cards at Lululemon.

It is difficult to overstate the power of social media's influence on teenage consumers. Delving into the Stanley Cup phenomenon gives a brief glimpse into how a single product can become a must-have item across all age groups, including those easily influenced teens who have money to burn – even if it's their own allotment.

The Stanley brand has been around since 1913, but has only recently become a very hot consumer product. The company's 40-ounce insulated tumbler was initially such a failure when it debuted in 2019 that it was temporarily discontinued. Then, thanks to the promotion of the cup on a blog and the introduction of some fun new colors, that single product boosted the company's profits from $70 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023, as The Daily Wire previously reported. mentioned.

During the January release of the limited-edition pink Stanley Cup at Target, people camped out all night with the goal of getting their hands on one of these coveted cups. There were long lines and some battles for the Stanley, which unsurprisingly sold out in minutes in stores and online.

Teenagers are as enamored with this $45 mug as anyone else, which is why the Australian schoolgirl included it on her list. And she wasn't the only one.

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today a report On Stanley's Madness a video surfaced on TikTok of a very young girl crying tears of joy upon opening her new mug.

The same article mentioned a story about TikTok user Dayna Motycka, who said she bought a leopard-print insulated mug from Walmart as a Christmas gift for her 9-year-old daughter, but the little girl came home “upset” when her peers “made sure to ‘let her know’ that It wasn't a 'real' Stanley Cup. The girl's teammates told her the cup was 'fake' and 'not cool'.

“Do I think a 9-year-old needs a Stanley? No. Do I have one? Yes, I have one,” Motyka said in the video. “I don’t have 50 Stanleys in different colors. I will not target and fight other women or mothers for trying to get my new Valentine Stanley. I have one.”

Eventually, she bought her daughter the brand's insulated mug.

“Can we buy her a Stanley? Yes. Did I think she needed one? No,” she said. “Obviously I’m being proven wrong by the kids at our school who make fun of her because she doesn’t have a real brand Stanley.”

Stanley's obsession is absurd and trivial, but it is also harmless. Who really cares if a group of teenagers are fascinated by expensive drink stands?

This may be true, but some social media trends that resonate with teens have potentially harmful consequences. For example, federalism a report On how TikTok is killing pre-teens, he mentions that many of these young girls are using skincare products made for older women. This may not matter when it comes to lip gloss, but it is very important that these girls start trying products like chemical peels on a regular basis.

The article references a now-viral video on TikTok showing a nine-year-old customer shopping for a Babyfacial, a chemical exfoliant from the brand Drunk Elephant. The product claims to reduce “the appearance of pores, fine lines and wrinkles.” The little girl said she used this product “daily.”

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The Sephora employee who made the video also mentioned how she saw “15-year-olds… com[ing] “With chemical burns” while working there.

There's also a more disturbing TikTok trend that involves young girls diagnosing themselves with serious mental health conditions by observing others on social media.

“What they do is they go into the interactive media space to comfort themselves, to make themselves feel better, to make themselves masters of that environment when they don't feel like they've mastered the environment of the outside world,” Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital, said of this. New trend, per CBS News.

“There is a demand that people are meeting now. The real question is: How well and safely can we fill them?”

“What's available on the Internet is free for everyone. There's really no accountability for this and no responsibility taken,” Rich added.

It's no coincidence that the rise of TikTok has coincided with an absolute explosion in the number of very young children experiencing rapid gender dysphoria. Cases of “gender dysphoria” have risen in every state Except one Over the past few years, an estimated 300,000 minors between the ages of 13 and 17 have identified as transgender as of 2022, and the number continues to rise.

While LGBTQ community activists will argue that this phenomenon does not exist or is irrelevant, the public need only look no further than little girls crying over an insulated cup to see that the power of social media's influence on children is very real indeed.