A Chinese mother recently walked into a police station asking for help to remove a bicycle from around her neck after her 4-year-old boy put it on her and forgot the unlock code.

On October 7th, a young mother walked into a police station in Huai’an, China’s Jiangsu Province, with a bizarre “choker” around her neck – a grey and yellow bicycle locking device similar to a U-lock. She told the staff there that her son was playing with the lock next to her as she was cleaning the bathroom when he suddenly put it around her neck and locked it. She thought it funny at first, as it was her lock and she knew the unlock code, but it turned out that the boy had somehow changed it and now neither of them knew the combination to unlock it.

“I was cleaning the toilet, and my son was playing with the bicycle lock next to me,” the unnamed woman told police. “He suddenly put it around my neck and locked it. I couldn’t unlock it with the code I had set and I had no idea know how many times he changed it, so I panicked.”

Police examined the lock and determined that they couldn’t do much to help the woman, so they called a team of local firefighters. They took a small towel and placed it between the woman’s neck and the bicycle lock, as they struggled to cut it with two pairs of wire cutters.

As the lock came off and the woman sighed in relief, one of the firefighters told her “You should bring your son here, we’ll help educate him,” to which she answered that she had already spanked him for his naughty behavior and that he was at home sleeping.

The woman’s story and the video footage of the lock removal went viral on Chinese social media, with most people commenting about the need for boundaries to be set by parents in order to avoid situations like this.

 

“A typical example of failure to teach children about boundaries, I did not laugh at all after watching this,” one person commented.

“Even if it’s between parent and child, boundaries have to be set for all actions and words, children cannot cross these boundaries,” someone else wrote.