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The children are afraid. Terrified, in fact. But you'd never know it by looking at them because they're too scared to move a muscle, especially the ones around their eyes.

What are they so afraid of? The short answer is -- my face.

Not just my face but also the faces of all middle-aged women who foolishly smiled, laughed, winced, frowned or squinted between birth and the year 2025. According to some social media influencers, all those facial movements are a surefire way to get wrinkles and look old. So they're saving their followers from this wretched fate by showing them how to stop making everyday facial expressions.

When my college-aged daughter first told me about this online trend, I was sure she was joking. She had to show me a few of the videos so I could see for myself that some young, beautiful teens and twentysomethings are making it their mission to stop moving their faces in hopes that they won't develop crow's feet, laugh lines and other tell-tale signs of facial aging.

In one of the videos, a young woman describes how she taught herself to have conversations with friends without moving her face as she responds to whatever they're saying. (Can you imagine having a conversation with a close friend whose face never moves, no matter how exciting or tragic your news might be?)

I wish I could dismiss this kind of anti-aging crap as pure foolishness because, mostly, it is. But I also know that, particularly for women, facial lines often feel like yet another way we haven't done "enough." Didn't moisturize enough. Didn't avoid the sun enough. Didn't buy enough of the right skincare products. Didn't sleep enough. Didn't do enough expensive treatments at the dermatologist's office. Didn't lower our stress enough.

It's easy to understand why women hope that a behavioral change (even a ridiculous one like never moving a facial muscle) can allow us to get older without ever looking like it. We all have a mental picture of ourselves, and it's fixed in time. So when we see a recent picture that doesn't look much like the one we hold inside our head, it's unnerving. Sometimes I see a recent photo and think, "Is this really what I look like? What happened to my face?" If Mother Nature had a general manager, I'd probably stomp up to her and demand an explanation.

But deep down, I already know the explanation: Life is in motion. So is time. So is gravity. So are the genetics being passed down from one generation to the next. There's no stopping it.

And we shouldn't want to stop it because it would be weird if we did. Have you ever visited a celebrity wax museum? It's entertaining for the first few minutes but then gets slightly creepy. The resemblance is there, but something always feels off. The absolute stillness is so unnatural that the more you look at it, the more fake it seems.

I wish I could tell the girls in those videos that they're wasting some of their youth worrying about something that will happen anyway. Even if they somehow manage to remain expressionless for the next 30 years and never eat sugar, lose sleep with a newborn or drink through a straw, one day they will see a photo of themselves that doesn't match the one they hold inside their minds. And it will feel like a slap to the face.

But maybe a metaphorical slap is what we need to wake up to reality. We are made for motion, and we live on a planet that rotates as it moves around the sun. There is no gaming the system by pausing your face.

So I'll take my crow's feet, laugh lines and whatever else may come. Some days I'll be (mostly) at peace with it, and other days I won't. But I won't give up laughing. Or wide-eyed excitement over good news. Or cringing if I hit my elbow. Or frowning over wet socks. Because movement, small and large, is life. Let's live it while we've got it.