Why I hate your Facebook posts about the Bonds Baby Search competition

TO the mothers of Australia, please stop clogging up my Facebook feed with demands for me to vote for your darling baby for Bonds Baby Search.

Baby Girl - Cute, Happy and Smiling

To the mothers of Australia,

Please stop clogging up my Facebook feed with demands for me to vote for your darling baby for Bonds Baby Search.

The more you ask, the less likely I am to jump on the Bonds website and vote repeatedly for your Charlize or Cayden for “Toothiest Grin” or “Chubbiest Cheeks”.

Use all the !!!!!! or xxxxxx you like, but it’s not going to make any difference at all.

I will not share your post. I will not even get your hopes up by liking it on Facebook.

You can put a bowl of spaghetti on your baby’s head.

You can put a pair of sunglasses on them.

You can pick that shot where they’re walking around in their daddy’s work boots.

Harper won the Bonds baby search competition in the 7-18 months category last year.

But it won’t make a jot of difference because I am immune to your baby’s undoubted charms.

In fact I would prefer to drink a cup of cold sick than set an alarm on my iPhone so I can bombard the Bonds Baby Search website on the hour every hour until your Zaylee or Zumba wins the People’s Choice Award.

(Or, as it should be called, the Lots of Friends on Facebook Award.)

I know you desperately want your child to win as an affirmation of your ability to produce talented and beautiful offspring.

And I know that you really believe that the moment the judges see your baby, they are going to feel the same way you do — that he or she is on a higher level than the rest and a shoo-in for the top prize.

Poppy Hewitt, won the overall national Baby Bonds search in 2015.

But did you realise you have about as much chance of pashing Hillary Clinton as you do winning this competition? Between 30,000 and 60,000 people are going to enter, and last year more than 250,000 people’s choice votes were cast.

I’ll bet they came from the same 20,000 mums who bullied their relatives and Facebook friends into voting for them all day, every day.

In any case, the prizes aren’t really all that flash. You have a one in 60,000 chance of getting your bub in a TV commercial or billboard and you also can win a few hundred dollars in prizes. Hardly worth all that posting and reposting, is it?

I also note with some alarm that some of the mums are so keen to win this comp that they aren’t that nice.

There is something about baby beauty comps that turn parents ugly.

A few years ago the website couldn’t keep up with the demand from parents wanting to pimp their kids, and it crashed.

Mums went beserk, accusing organisers of being biased, accusing other mums of being too aggressive and complaining they couldn’t vote more than once for their own bubs.

Pour food over your baby girl’s head. Just don’t ask me to repost the pic, says Susie. Picture: ThinkStock

And do you remember that time when someone tagged a picture of a Eurasian baby with the caption “Bonds Australia, not Asia”?

A few years ago one child was dubbed an “ugly duckling” and another “a child only a mother could love”.

It’s funny, I think, that lots of people say they don’t want photos of their babies and kids on the internet because they worry about pedophiles.

But when they have the chance of 15 seconds of fame and a suitcase of free Wondersuits, they pop them online and shout it from the rooftops.

The only winners in all of this are Bonds, who get to sell an extra 60,000 gro-suits. This year Bonds say entrants don’t have to wear Bonds – unlike previous years – but a quick look shows most of them do anyway.

As I write, the competition has only been open for four hours and already there’s nearly 1000 babies online vying for just a handful of prizes. Imagine what it will be like in a few weeks time.

I understand what it’s like to be a first-time mum with too much time on your hands and so much love for your precious bub that you think you have the cutest baby ever.

But there’s a big difference between thinking you’ve got a cute baby, and needing external validation from the people at Bonds that yours is the best, most beautiful baby of them all.