"We really never meant for any of this to be taken this way," the father of the boys said.
The parents of two boys left in tears following a now-viral prank are insisting it was all in good fun — but admit they may have taken the joke a little too far.
In the video posted to the dad's YouTube channel, DaddyOFive, the couple can be heard shouting expletives as they accuse the two boys of spilling ink over the floor, leaving the children in tears.
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The couple has since admitted to Inside Edition, “We got carried away in the moment."
"We really never meant for any of this to be taken this way," said Mike, the father of the boys.
In the video, the children’s mom, Heather, can be seen holding a bottle of disappearing ink.
“I'm going to squirt it all over his carpet and start flipping out,” she says.
And that's exactly what she does, while screaming for her 10-year-old son, Cody.
“What the [expletive]!” she screams in the video.
When Cody runs in, he insists he had nothing to do with it. At that point, his dad joins in, demanding to know why he spilled the ink. They then address the second boy, asking why he did it.
It doesn't take long for both children to be left sobbing.
After three minutes of torment, the parents finally reveal it's all a prank.
“We got you both!" says Heather. "You were innocent bystanders."
“You just got owned," Mike adds. "It's just a prank, brah."
The kids were clearly not laughing, and neither was Mike's YouTube audience when he posted the video, even with the disclaimer, "No child was harmed in the making of this video."
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"This video made me shudder," one comment read. Another called it, "Mental abuse... Just as bad as physical abuse." One Inside Edition viewer called the prank "sick."
After they were bashed online, the couple said they may have gotten carried away, but insisted they meant no harm.
"He wasn't really traumatized, that's the thing," Heather said. “Honestly we were all just having fun. After everything, we had a good laugh."
They insisted the children were not emotionally harmed by the prank.
"If we saw signs of anything like that we would get help immediately," Mike said.
The parents later took to YouTube again, claiming that their children were acting and had been in on the prank for the whole time.
"They're over-exaggerated," Mike says in the clip. "Some videos are scripted."
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