A mum found her missing child in minutes using a 'looking loudly' search technique she remembered learning about in a TikTok video.
Wedding photographer Krista Piper had taken her children to a large play centre with "lots of little nooks and crannies". Her three-year-old daughter Lily was going back and forth between the different sets and Krista was talking to another mum when she suddenly lost sight of her child.
She began to panic and yell Lily's name - when a "lightbulb went off" and she remembered a TikTok video she had seen about a mum who lost her son at a supermarket. In the video, rather than yelling her son's name, the parent shouted out a description of the clothes he was wearing and was able to find him "way faster", Mirror UK reports.
Taking to TikTok, Krista - who goes by the username @krista.piper - recalled: "So that is what I did. I stopped calling out her name, and I started yelling, 'little girl, pink shirt, pink Minnie Mouse shirt!'. I'm sure people thought that I was a little crazy, she was probably only missing for like a minute, to maybe a minute and a half, but for me it felt like eternity."
On reflection, Krista notes that she could have also added descriptors such as Lily's age or hair colour, but that was the quickest thing she could think of to say in the moment. After Krista started yelling the description, she began to hear other mums repeating the same thing and minutes later another mum spotted Lily.
Krista said in the video, which has since been watched over 546,000 times: "If you ever lose your child, or dog or anything, yell out their description, raise your voice. You know, I probably looked like a crazy person, but it got the job done."
Other parents took to the comment section to praise the photographer for spreading the word about this search technique. Many agreed that this was a far better method than simply shouting out a child's name.
One person said: "Yes! Yelling their name doesn't help because no one knows what Sally looks like, but they can pick out a three-year-old in a pink shirt and blue jeans."
Another wrote: "This is such incredible advice and any parent's worst nightmare. So thankful for mums pulling together to help find her. Good job mamma!"
A third applauded: "This is wonderful - thank you! I try to dress kids in bright clothes when we go to big places like that just for my own eyes but it’s a great idea."
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