The Boy Who Cried About a Chihuahua Puppy

There is a video, you have probably seen it, that a parent filmed in roughly 2018 and that the internet has been recirculating, on a roughly six-month cycle, ever since. A small boy, four or five years old, is holding a chihuahua puppy. The puppy is approximately two and a half pounds. The boy is approximately fifty pounds. The boy is crying. Not upset crying. Not the kind of crying that resolves itself within thirty seconds. The other kind of crying. The kind of crying that adults are not, on average, available to do anymore, because at some point we crossed a developmental threshold and stopped being able to express the precise emotion the boy is expressing, which is "the puppy is so cute that my entire small body is failing to contain it."

The puppy, for her part, is licking his chin.

On the Specific Quality of the Crying

This is not, to be clear, an emergency. The boy is fine. The boy is, by the operational definition of "fine," extremely fine. The boy has been handed a puppy, the puppy has accepted the boy, and the boy's nervous system, which is approximately five years and six weeks old, has produced the only response it has available, which is tears.

The boy's mother is filming. The boy's mother, who can be heard in the background, is also crying, but in the laughing-while-crying register that mothers operate in roughly forty percent of the time when their children are in the presence of a small animal. The puppy is wearing no expression of any kind, because she is a puppy and has not learned facial expressions yet, but if puppies could form an expression, hers would be the one a person makes during a long meeting they did not need to be in.

Why This Specific Combination Works

A child holding a puppy is, in scale terms, the only emotionally lossless transaction the universe permits between two living things. The dog is small enough not to alarm the child. The child is small enough not to alarm the dog. There is no power imbalance. There is no language barrier worth mentioning. The interaction proceeds in a register both parties have access to, which is "warm thing, against me, on purpose."

(The chihuahua, you should know, has been on the planet, for selection-purposes, for approximately ten centuries. The boy has been on the planet for sixty months. The chihuahua has the longer institutional memory in this exchange. She does not, however, appear to be using it.)

On Children Who Cry About Puppies

The relevant developmental research, including the 2017 work by Hammond and colleagues in Developmental Psychology, suggests that children below about eight years old have not yet developed the emotional regulation strategies adults rely on to dampen overwhelming positive affect. The technical term is "affect upregulation"; the practical term is "tears." The child is not sad. The child is, by every measurable physiological signal except the tears, having the best moment of his current week.

There is a small, specific honesty to this that I find, watching the video for the eleventh time on a Tuesday, slightly difficult to look directly at. The boy's response is the response we would all have, in some private chamber of ourselves, if we had not been trained out of it. Cute thing. Tears. End of analysis.

On Why It Resurfaces

The video resurfaces because the internet, despite its many other failures, is correctly calibrated on a small number of subjects, and the small-child-meets-small-dog event is one of them. The platforms have learned that we will, reliably, watch the video again, and they are right. We will watch the video again. We will, in private, do what is functionally a small version of what the boy does, which is feel a thing, briefly, that we are not allowed to feel often anymore.

A Closing Image

The chihuahua in the video is, by the most recent update I have been able to find, ten or eleven years old now. Her name was, depending on which caption you trust, either "Lola" or "Ladybug"; I am told these are common names. The boy is presumably entering high school. The puppy is, presumably, sleeping in his bed. None of this has been reported to me directly. I am extrapolating from the most recent cute-content cycle the way a person watching baseball extrapolates the score from the seventh inning. The video is among the small set of chihuahua hero stories the internet has filed under "things that have not gone wrong yet."

For more in this register, the bonding piece covers the trust-building work, and the twenty-five facts piece covers the breed history that, ten centuries on, produces a dog small enough to fit in a five-year-old's hands.

For more chihuahua reportage from the field, browse the Stories desk or subscribe for the next dispatch.