Many of you sent in this hyhhnsinhk
dramatic story of a dresser falling on a Utah 2-year-old and his twin brother rescuing him from underneath it.
It sickens me the way KSL TV news showed the worst part of the video three times in two minutes, but here you have it:
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As MSN reports:
A video monitor in the bedroom of twin brothers Brock and Bowdy Shoff, 2, captured an unsettling incident last week in which a dresser toppled on the pair as Brock climbed in an open drawer.
Brock can be seen trapped for nearly a minute before Bowdy saves his brother by pushing the dresser off the top of him. Brock thankfully did not suffer any serious injuries.
“Bowdy just came around and assessed the situation thinking, ‘I needed to help my twin brother. What do I do here?”’ Kayli Shoff, the boys’ mother, told KSL. “I really believe in a twin bond. You always hear that and I believe these two have it.”
What’s amazing about the story is not just that, ho hum, a 2-year-old saved another 2-year-old, showing what kids are made of. It’s that (as you wrote to me):
1 – The mom was brave enough to share the video, which I do believe will encourage other people to secure their dressers, shelves and TVs to the walls. That’s a win!
2 – The comments on some sites with the story, like this one, are not filled with, “SEND THE MOM TO JAIL!”-types of responses. Other sites, like this one, seem to have proportionally more. My guess is that this has to do with pile-on pitilessness: Once a couple commenters start in with, “Where was the mother???” others do, too, (Here’s a lovely story about another second-guessed mom, and her terrific response.)
3 – “The amazing part is that the story claims that the mom responded by anchoring the dresser to the wall rather than suing Ikea,” as one of you wrote. That is perhaps the most newsworthy angle! – L
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A brother saves his twin from a toppled dresser, and teaches us all a bunch of lessons.
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How nice that nobody’s going to jail or getting sued. Strong 2-year-old, by the way! Incidentally, I doubt she could sue Ikea – every piece of Ikea furniture I’ve ever bought, down to the barely 3-feet-tall toy kitchen that weighs about 15 pounds, comes with wall anchors and an admonition to use them.
Typical. Show the shocking part three times, and the awesome part where it shows that even young kids can assess situations and problem-solve one time. I love that the kids went right back to playing after realizing neither of them were seriously injured.
@Coasterfreak
“even young kids can assess situations and problem-solve one time. I love that the kids went right back to playing after realizing neither of them were seriously injured.”
They’ll have to do better than that if they expect to go to college, where they’re required to be crybully snowflakes.
I seriously cannot ever imagine putting a video monitor in my kid’s bedroom.
It about time they started secure those things to the walls.. But the other case I don’t blame mom I blame the nurse who dropped him. She had a job to do and that was watch the baby and she fell asleep while holding him on the job.
I’m surprized some people are not yelling: “Burn the mom at the stake.” That would be more in keeping with the mental state of critics.
I was glad that this was a learning experience for the boys. 1, don’t crawl on things they were probably told not to crawl on before (we have 13-year old twins and I remember having that conversation…fortunately, mine listened) and 2, thinking through a situation and solving a problem without the need of an adult. I really liked how you can see the boy thinking of a solution and, through trial and error, finding one. When I was a kid, before helicopter parenting, this is what we did all of the time…and, I think I and my siblings & friends are better off for it.
From the way that NBC News was portraying this last night, she is going to sue.
I want that dresser charged with assault and battery! It was premeditated! It was the plan the entire time! That dresser should be stripped of its drawers and sent to the woodpile for warming on a cold winter’s Utah night!
Ikea dressers are not heavy like dressers of yore when they were dovetailed together so that is a blessing for the kids.
Seriously though, the hardware to secure the dresser is called two wood or drywall screws in a package from the local hardware store for about 98 cents. Just make sure you screw them in to a stud or use a drywall anchor in addition to the screws.
As for the kids, the learned physics and mechanics lesson here at an early age of climbing things, climbing things that shouldn’t be climbed and fulcrum points related to center of gravity.
In the end, they are fine rambunctious boys who will continue to be boys climbing things as they age none the worse for wear.
Alll I thought watching that was I used to do that… And none of our stuff was ever anchored to the wall. I don’t think it was a thing in the 70’s. But the dressers were a lot heavier then, I’d have been screwed if they had tipped!
Very few people read the directions and safety warnings that come with most products. Dressers, bookcases, and large TVS have had straps and brackets included along with the simple installation directions and warnings about being a tipping hazard. I’ll bet most of you have thrown those away or never noticed them. And yes, Ikea has been successfully sued to the tune of $50 million dollars for somehow not making people follow their warnings. It’s always someone else’s fault.
Kids are resourceful; we need to let them be.
As a Utah resident who lives very near where this happened, I am happy to report that it seems us in Utah are generally leaning toward Free-Range, at least by my conversations and many comments on news sites.
I have to admit, I wouldn’t blame the parents (not “the mom,” both parents were home) for the accident, but I was pretty surprised that according to the story I read, they didn’t know it had happened until they checked the video and saw the dresser on the floor. That child is crying HARD when he finally gets out from under the dresser. What was their setup that they couldn’t hear that? Kids don’t need constant supervision, not by a long shot, but very as a general rule I don’t think very small children, like 2-year-olds, should be on their own to the point where no one is available to help them, or even aware, when a serious accident does happen.
I want to hear from these kids in another 15 years and see how the story has been told to them. I want the story to be like Baby Clark Kent, lifting that car! Who didn’t think of that scene?
“Actually Dave the video is hard to watch…….†(that’s why we show it 3 times)
It’s entertainment similar to a football game. You can show the highlights several times. The child helping to save his brother is boring and isn’t worth a replay. What matters is the dresser falling.
Good news = boring (not a ratings grabber)
Bad news = entertainment (great for ratings)
The network ‘hides’ behind their ‘concern’. They show the dresser falling 3 times because they don’t want it to happen again. This is a smokescreen for their policy, all bad news is to be maximised.
“I seriously cannot ever imagine putting a video monitor in my kid’s bedroom.”
The first thing I thought when viewing this video monitor was that they invested in a high-tech surveillance but not a wall anchor? Second thing was how amazingly awesome this twin is at helping his brother.
We got a video monitor as a gift that I never used (nursery was next to the Master). We later used it in our basement playroom when they were toddlers because I worked from home and thought it’d help me keep an eye on them when I was upstairs.
They learned how to turn the camera around to face a blank wall and told me they didn’t like me spying on them. Kids can play very nicely together without constant watching eyes.
It is nice that this has been turned into a heartwarming story, but the less-edited video shows typical 2-yo behavior. When the dresser falls on one kid, the other kid spends well over a minute trying to figure out how to fix the electronic gadget (music player?) that fell near him. He climbs over the dresser while the other kid is under it. Finally he comes back around to the top and tries lifting then pushing the dresser off. The trapped kid had mostly worked his way out from under the dresser by then. It was a good thing the drawers jammed and prevented the full weight of the dresser from pressing on the trapped kid.
I think it’s an inspiring story of the resilience and resourcefulness of even very young children. And a reminder of how much we underestimate children in our society. And yes, a reminder to anchor heavy furniture to the wall (I guess.) What confuses me, and I am not saying I actually know the answer to this, is all of the safety measures that are considered absolutely obligatory today that nobody did when I was a child. And I keep wondering how we all survived. My parents never baby-proofed our house – no outlet covers, furniture not anchored, jumping on trampolines with no nets, seatbelt was just a simple lap belt,etc. And no one else we knew did either. And I never heard of anyone running afoul of these things. To me the answer was that they were watching me all the time. Parents today who argue the other side say that someone can look away for just a second and one of these dire things could have happened.
It’s the same way with young children in restaurants. Back then they put small children in booster seats and if a child became loud or unruly the parent would take him/her out of the room. Now there are parents who claim it’s not possible for children to sit still in a restaurant and they really have no choice but to let them run around the other tables. I am wondering how so many things that were taken care of so simply and matter-of-factly when I was young are now considered impenetrable conundrums.
@lollipoplover
“The first thing I thought when viewing this video monitor was that they invested in a high-tech surveillance but not a wall anchor?”
That’s an extremely good point!
@K: “That child is crying HARD when he finally gets out from under the dresser. What was their setup that they couldn’t hear that?”
My younger brother fell off the balcony once when he was 2. My mother had been busy with the laundry and didn’t realize what had happened, until she heard him crying even louder than usual, saw him lying (sitting?) in the garden and suddenly thought, ‘Wasn’t he UPSTAIRS just a second ago??!!’
It wasn’t that she was a bad parent. It was just that it wasn’t unusual for him to be crying/screaming whenever his evil big sister did whatever to him.
@lollipoplover – that was my first thought as well, the parents were concerned enough to implement video surveillance, but hadn’t taken the basic precaution of securing the furniture (particularly an IKEA dresser!).
But, maybe they’d never heard of furniture overturning on kids when they were young and so decided straps were as superfluous as shoulder belts, airbags and crumple zones.
I also wondered how they didn’t hear that thing toppling over!
“”It wasn’t that she was a bad parent. It was just that it wasn’t unusual for him to be crying/screaming whenever his evil big sister did whatever to him.””
We used to joke, years back, that my younger sister would one day probably die in a horrible home accident while we did nothing because she just bawled over everything. (She is in her mid-twenties now and very much alive, and is now at more human levels of drama)
Guys, the whole point of this post was “people can be judgemental about literally any event.” And several of your responses are “Why did she have a video monitor??” Seriously, people.
@Jessica
LOL Good one!
@Anna so sue them for not making the lettering telling you to use it MUCH BIGGER and extra bold, and not writing it in such a way that it’s mandatory to use those wall anchors.
The determined ambulance chaser will always find an angle to sue, and this’d be no exception.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the way lawyers think.
Does look like a pretty flimsy piece and unstable of IKEA furniture btw, those legs are extremely slim… Not at all like my dresser which has a far more stable base.
As to the strength of the toddler, yah. Even if it was empty (which is likely the case because a properly loaded dresser will have a lot of weight at the bottom, another thing you could sue over, if the instructions didn’t mention to load heavy items at the bottom…) it’d be pretty heavy for a 2 year old.
“Tonight, a parent’s worst nightmare!!!”
Really? I’m a parent; this isn’t even close to my worst nightmare.
I did see that video and a far majority of the bloggers below the article/video seem to have gave the parents the benefit of the doubt. Once in a while some moron would post that the mother was “an irresponsible parent” and many of the moronic bloggers would post how they could not understand why the mother did not hear the dresser fall and that the reason was because she was probably doing drugs, yada, yada, yada (even though the mother clearly explained in the article where she was when it happened and that she was miffed as to why she didn’t hear it). BUT the bloggers with common sense and reason would then slam them back and pretty much put them in their place.
Of course, it certainly was a dangerous situation and I don’t mean to make light of it BUT putting it into perspective, if the dresser was light enough to be pulled down by a couple of 2-year-olds, it probably wasn’t heavy enough to do major damage to the youngster it fell on as you could plainly see in the video. Fortunately it didn’t fall on him in a bad way like directly on his head BUT it is a warning to bolt all dressers to the wall in a toddler’s bedroom.
Family was on GMA this morning refuting the claims the video was a hoax as many are claiming now. Judgements run rampant by the ignorant. The boys by the way looked no worse for the wear on camera…
Ikea is getting press out of this too, so will their dresser sales sink like a “anchor” or not?
“Tonight, a parent’s worst nightmare!!!â€
“Really? I’m a parent; this isn’t even close to my worst nightmare.â€
The words, ‘parents worst nightmare’ is an attention getter. That’s all it is. Nobody believes that the words are true. This is the same as clickbait all over the internet such as, “Quit your job and earn $3,000 per day at homeâ€.
Sorry for the snipe. However any excuse will do. I love to keep pointing out that realism of Giligan’s Island lives on.
I know we aren’t allowed to anchor anything because we rent, and that has been the requirement on the majority of rentals we have had.
“I know we aren’t allowed to anchor anything because we rent, and that has been the requirement on the majority of rentals we have had.”
If you’re really worried, I’ve heard somewhere about anchoring stuff to a separate, heavy base instead, to make it less likely to tip. I’m not sure how effective or practical it us, but you could look it up to see.
So grateful this had an happy ending. Hope more parents learn from this video
I don’t think it matters whether they had video surveillance cameras up and a dresser that was not anchored. We all have things that we are more attuned to than others. Additionally, the news article I read about this indicated that the dad worked for the video surveillance company that sould the camera they have set up.
Its all well and good to say that furniture should be secured to the wall but what about if you cant?
What about if you are renting and cant fix things to the wall?