A mother received pushback online for posting a prank that left her son in tears.
In the video, the mother and her family are at a station waiting for a bullet train to Busan, South Korea, when she decides to pull the prank. She told her kids that the train doesn’t stop and that they would have to jump on while it’s moving.
“Do you think I’d make it?” the older son asked, waiting for reassurance from his mother. “On a scale from one to a hundred.”
“45,” the mother responded.
The younger boy chimed in confidently, saying he would make it on the train. The older son, named Ruben, continued to ask for instructions on how to get on when another train on a different track shoots by.
“That’s how fast it goes?” he asked repeatedly. “We got to jump on it?”
Ruben’s eyes start to swell up with tears when he realizes how fast the train is. In the video’s caption, the mother wrote that it was at that moment “he knew life was over.”
When the station announced that the train would pull into the station shortly, Ruben began to cry harder out of fear. Near the end of the video, his little brother tries to comfort him.
“It’s going to be all right, Ruben,” the brother said.
The mother ends the prank by admitting that the train does stop. When Ruben realized it was a prank, he stopped crying and tried to put her camera down as she laughed. The end of the video shows a picture of Ruben’s face while getting on “the stopped train.”
There have been mixed reactions to the viral prank online. Some people thought it was funny, while others condemned it. The video was initially posted on TikTok by @jsymone7 but was missing from the page as of Tuesday. It’s unclear why it was removed or deleted from the platform.
However, the video has been circulating on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“The calculations he was doing in his head told him “ain’t no way in hell,” one user said.
Another user slammed the video, saying they did not find humor in the joke.
“I don’t think this is funny at all. Smh what was the purpose of this video? Why play with his emotions like this? I don’t find this funny at all,” the person said.
Another user added: “Call me fun snatcher, but I really feel like the joke can stop once the child starts showing very clear signs of anxiety.”
