Girl, 4, Is Mid-Tantrum Until She Realizes Her Mom Is Recording Her. Then Her Whole Mood Changes (Exclusive)

Sara Moreton’s daughter was in the middle of a huge tantrum — until she realized she was being recorded.

In a now-viral video shared to the mom of two’s TikTok, Sara’s daughter Evie, 4, could be seen sitting on the stairs of their house and crying. “Evie, why are you sitting on the step? Huh?” Sara can be heard asking over her daughter’s screams.

“Why are you in time out?” asks Sara. Her daughter’s response is to kick her legs and swing her arms, moving further away from her mom on the stairs. “Are you in time-out because you were rude to Papi?”

“Here. Here’s Lamby,” Sara says, giving her daughter her stuffed animal.

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“Are you videoing me?” Evie asks in between tears. When her mom replies “no,” Evie starts cracking up. Her whole demeanor changes. She giggles and stands up as the video ends.

Now, Sara speaks with PEOPLE exclusively about her daughter’s vibe shift, saying that she does have a “sassy streak.”

“Evie is such a sweet and kind little girl,” she tells PEOPLE. “She definitely has a stubborn and sassy streak to her, though! Her grandpa (she calls him Papi) was in town for the holidays. She and Papi have such a strong bond, and she loves and looks up to him.”

“She is usually very good to her grandpa. That night, we were getting ready to have dinner, and Papi had asked her a question or to do something,” the mom of two said, adding she doesn’t remember exactly what it was. “And she responded with a rude and sassy comment. I normally don’t discipline Evie or her older brother, and as you can see in the video, I’m not very good at it since I hand her a toy.”

While Sara says her kids are normally very well-behaved, Evie hadn’t been behaving well for the past afternoon, and by evening, she was “fed up.” She said her daughter being rude to her grandpa was the “last straw.”

“I told her to go sit on the step if she couldn’t be nice to Papi,” remembers Sara. “She decided she didn’t want to be nice, and she went to sit on the step.”

Sara explains that her daughter has always been able to turn her crying off since all she wants is to be “forgiven and forgotten.”

“Evie is always able to turn her crying off in an instant whenever she feels like she is ‘in trouble,’ ” says Sara. “She hates when I’m upset with her and usually just wants a hug and for things to be forgiven and forgotten. She’s a very sensitive child and doesn’t like when anyone is upset with her (except her brother, she can handle when her brother is upset with her.”

“I don’t know if there are really any tell-tale signs that she is faking. I really just wanted her to stop crying, so I started recording her,” she adds.

At the end of the day, Sara thinks her daughter’s mood shifted because Evie realized that her mom wasn’t actually that mad at her.”

“I think her whole mood changed when I started to record her behavior because it was a cue to her that I wasn’t upset with her,” says Sara. “She also got the attention that she wanted from throwing an absolute tantrum (in her eyes, if I throw a tantrum, mom will pay attention to me and I’ll get what I want) which is definitely not something I want her to think, but I can’t stand to see my kids upset.”

“Evie loves attention and she asks me to record her often. She likes to watch what she did while I recorded her,” she continues. “This has been something she has loved since she was about 18 months. I have tons of videos on my phone of her. She always says, ‘I want to watch Evie on your phone.'”