Dad's a serious brat.
A video of a Canadian father bouncing lightweight balls off his son's head in a ball pit is making the rounds online, with the predictable chorus of readers chiming in on his parenting skills.
The video, titled "The Small, Unspoken Joys of Parenting," shows father and child goofing around in a ball pit. "See, when my son comes to these places he plays his own games, but so do I," says the dad, whose game involves bouncing the feathery light balls off a plastic play structure and clocking his kid in the head with them. The little boy barely registers the first strikes but then glares at dad, scolding, "It hit my head." Dad titters and lies, "I think the balls are broken."
We never see the father's face, as the Taiwan-based, motorcycle-vlog-loving man nerdily films the entire exchange using a camera implanted inside his own eyeglasses.
Well, if you're going to have to spend time in dubiously hygienic ball pits, you might as well make it worth your while.
"Watching this made me realize I want kids," wrote one commenter on Reddit, where the video quickly climbed the ratings since being posted on the weekend.
"Guy's doing a great job with his kid," wrote another. "He'll grow up not taking himself so seriously and hopefully not coddled to the point of being an absolute wimp when he's older. This small stuff plays a huge role in a child's developmental psychology. It's good to see parents not treating their kids like an antique vase from the Ming Dynasty."
Others weren't as gushy, pointing to the questionable caption the father appended to his YouTube video. "Is this the same guy that wakes his son up with a watergun?" squawked another Reddit commenter, while some on Gawker cried abuse.
While this dad is immature, he's also clearly in love with his kid. Perhaps the only quibble should be with the video's title: With nearly 64,000 views, this daddy-son moment was hardly "unspoken." My father also pulled silly stunts like this throughout our childhood, from doing doughnuts in the car in winter to pushing the tire swing too high at the park while we screamed in horror. But he wasn't filming his pranks for YouTube, let alone with spyware like this high-tech pop.
On the one hand, ball-pit dad got to capture a sweet moment in time, but this is also the era of oversharing, and as David After Dentist attests with its 118 million views and accompanying franchise, what's a brat dad without an audience?
The question remains, how will children of exhibitionist parents return the favour?
Zosia Bielski