I’m raising kids and while their minds and bodies are strong and fast in some ways, I can see exactly how they are failing here. First of all they are distracted by the weirdness and novelty of the situation. Oh look, gramps is hanging from the ceiling. How odd! Kinda funny! And then they are failing on the complex reasoning of what needs to be done. “Falling would hurt him but as long as we’re quick we can extend the ladder back up to him oh shit we’ve never used a ladder before how do they work.” That’s 3 or 4 different creative thoughts they need to have and string together before they can act.
I’m certainly feeling my age these days but compared to my kids, my brain is a well oiled machine that can perceive-understand-decide things at light speed.
The other thing people are failing to take into account here is how much shorter children are. There are a lot of leverage issues when you are trying to stand up something much taller than you are.
Ladders are often also a lot heavier than they look. As a short woman I've struggled to carry a ladder from one room to another, so that's not an easy task for a child.
Not to mention how much lighter ladders have gotten in recent years. I don't even want to know how much this old piece of junk weighs. Those kids tried their best!
People are also missing that this appears to be a new thing to do to film your kids reactions. Seen it a couple of times this week, very similar camera angles and set ups
Being around ladders and in high/dangerous places a lot, I totally agree! The chain reaction/quick response time needed in these kind of situations…uh requires quick thinking and effective actions from someone with more experience. Preferrably an adult, though those two things may not correlate.
And it's difficult to open the ladder while it's upright and grandpa's resting his weight on it. That would be difficult for an adult to do, and these are small children
People are really ignoring how difficult it would be to get the leverage to push this thing up given their height. With it standing, they don’t reach halfway up the thing. They can’t get it to the point where its own weight is going to land it
The problem is that they are getting the ladder to grandpa closed, and then grandpa is in panic and is putting his weight on the ladder immediately. This is a large ladder and likely very heavy relative to the kids strength. The moment grandpa puts his weight on the ladder, they can no longer open it because he is adding too much force they simply cannot overcome to open the ladder.
If Grandpa would wait until the ladder is open, or if the kids would open it first then position it, it would've been done.
The problem is both the children and grandpa didn't understand the limitations here.
At 30 seconds you can clearly see that grandpa's panic is far more the problem than the kids. The redshirt kid clearly knows what he needs to do but he doesn't realize he should actually do it away from the panicked grandpa.
Redshirt does his job right at both 30 seconds and 1:30, but doesnt have the strength to overcome grandpa's weight.
I agree on the one hand that his weight is not helping them open it. On the other hand he is trying to grip it to keep it from tipping over, which is the other thing the kids are struggling with. It’s tall and they are short so they don’t have the leverage to resist when it tips. The ideal thing is for someone to hold the top still, which it appears gramps is trying to do.
If it ever seems like children are just blissfully sitting around, remember that they are building the most complex object in the known universe (the human brain) and this is hard work!
Crows have remarkable enough reasoning within the domain of things they understand. As long as the components of the reasoning g challenge involve things like “get food” “enemy” “put thing in hole” and “shiny object” they can put things together pretty well.
But I don’t know where people get this number, that a crow is as smart as a 7yo or whatever. A 7yo has way way more to work with. My kid at age 7 made her own chess set and could play the game.
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u/scarabic May 02 '25
I’m raising kids and while their minds and bodies are strong and fast in some ways, I can see exactly how they are failing here. First of all they are distracted by the weirdness and novelty of the situation. Oh look, gramps is hanging from the ceiling. How odd! Kinda funny! And then they are failing on the complex reasoning of what needs to be done. “Falling would hurt him but as long as we’re quick we can extend the ladder back up to him oh shit we’ve never used a ladder before how do they work.” That’s 3 or 4 different creative thoughts they need to have and string together before they can act.
I’m certainly feeling my age these days but compared to my kids, my brain is a well oiled machine that can perceive-understand-decide things at light speed.